You Don't Have to Dance for Them

Other Mommies

2012-02-03T09:40:00.000-06:00

Just before I woke up this morning, I was having this dream where I was babysitting. The kids were strangers, not familiar from my waking life, and someone handed me a baby to hold. He was hungry and was making motions with his lips that he wanted me to breastfeed him. I said, "sorry buddy, my boobies don't make milk like other mommies." Then I woke up.

The words that I said to this little hungry child rang in my head. At first I felt sad, connecting this to my fear that I won't be a good mother if I have kids of my own. That I'll neglect them. Then I started thinking about the way I phrased it, "other mommies," as if in the dream I already WAS a mother and just couldn't "make milk" like the other ones could.

This idea of being able to make milk has hung in my thoughts all morning. Like you either can or you can't - or at least that was the reality in my dream. The ability to nourish another human life, the capacity to create a substance to sustain another's growth...it's somewhat magical to me. Many times, in anguish and despair, I've asked myself whether I'm too damaged to be a mother. Too starved to have anything to give. Too much a child myself to be able to offer nourishment to a new life. Too greedy for all the love, too selfish for the task.

There's this wonderful passage in the book White Oleander by Janet Fitch, a book I've read many times, about the universal mother we all long for. [Sidenote: Yes, I know it was an Oprah book and they made a second-rate movie version of it - it's an amazing book and I stand by it until the end!] I think it's fitting in this post. The protagonist, Astrid, is with her friend who is giving birth in this scene, and she remarks about how these women in the delivery room call out for their mothers:

“But then I realized, they weren't calling out for their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers, purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in in for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”

I cry every time I get to this part of the book. Big old choking sobs. I feel humbled by the universality of this longing for the blood mother - I'm not the first, not the last, not the only one. In being humbled by my own fears that I can't "make milk," in learning to care for Little Upsi, in asking myself whether I have the stuff it takes to be a good-enough mother, I find a link in myself to this lifeforce of "fierce compassion." I rekindle the flame of hope that it's not too late for me. The fact that I worry, that I care enough about it to entertain the possibility that I might not have children of my own - it gives me hope.

Oh Wise One

2012-02-02T10:22:00.007-06:00

Winterskiprincess and Lisette both have posts up right now about dealing with comments. We've all found ourselves in the situation: to publish or not to publish? I'd like to make a few points about the comment Winterskiprincess received (check out Lisette's post, too, because the comment-at-issue contains much of the same tenor, and she does a bang-up job talking us through it). My bold for emphasis:

"I really, REALLY hope you're seeking therapy to try to get past this, because at a certain juncture, and a certain age, I don't think all this rumination is healthy . . . do you find yourself depressed often? If so, I wonder if it has anything to do with the inability to let go of this kind of stuff. It's kinda sad, to be kept prisoner for a huge chunk of your life, to something(s) that happened when you were very young and had no power over the things that happened to you. My personal opinion is that, if you're past the age of 30 and have moved away and have life autonomy, you're no longer a victim, you're a volunteer. You have a choice here . . . completely breaking all contact is definitely on the table, too. Stop pissing and moaning, and take REAL action. I wish you the best."

Why thank you, oh wise one, for your observations! How kind of you to spend time wishing me the best as you slice and dice your way through my experience. What level of rumination is healthy? What is the right and proper time to "let go" of "this kind of stuff"? What is this "real action" you speak of that I have failed to take? Am I to infer that you know what is best for me? How familiar, how downright cozy we are with this form of belittlement.

And last I checked, Winterskiprincess has gone no contact! Did the commenter fail to note the REAL action in the goddamn title of her blog? Just because we take real action, doesn't mean we aren't going to have feelings about it to work through. If you think it's so sad, please, by all means, find yourself something else to read! We're not here to please you.

We're going to get these kinds of comments for as long as we dare to talk about narcissism in relationships, especially family relationships. The people who believe they are most free are the first to tell you what a sad little prisoner you are. The people most uncomfortable looking their own lonely suffering square in the face are the first to urge you to move on already.

Real support doesn't feel like a slap in the face. When you feel the sting, but it comes in the form of "well meaning advice," trust the underlying judgment being passed, not the stated intentions.

You know what I find kinda sad? Trolls.

Testing Testing 1-2-3

2012-02-01T09:59:00.003-06:00

I'm on a Biblical groove this week, so I want to share this snippet from the blog "Narcissists Suck," a snippet that speaks to issues I've been struggling with lately:

"The first person to tell us we are wrong, bad, and cruel when we demand a clear demonstration of repentance is the malignant narcissist. The next person to tell you it is wrong to expect this clear demonstration are the Christian do-gooders who have bought into a mindset that expecting unequivocal signs of repentance is itself somehow sinful. Their ill-conceived advice and admonishment are not in accord with the Bible record. The story of Joseph tells us it is not wrong to test for repentance. It is the course of wisdom and integrity. To state it in the positive, it is right and good and wise to test for repentance. Not to be cruel to our former abusers, but to ascertain whether or not someone is sufficiently changed so that contact with them no longer presents a danger to life or liberty. If someone is unwilling to bear the test they leave you with no way to assume they are repentant."

May we all have the courage to find out for ourselves what is true and what is false, and find comfort in the truth, however terrible, however unfortunate. When someone is only pretending to be different, it won't take long for their true face to surface.

From the same post linked above: "Telling an unrepentant narcissist you forgive them is a travesty and violation of true forgiveness. They will take your cheap grace and throw it in your face along with greater abuses."

Out of Context

2012-01-31T13:47:00.005-06:00

NM just posted this on FB:

“Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.” -Alice Miller

If only she would have read the very next sentence (or the book for that matter):

“And the fountainhead of all contempt, all discrimination, is the more or less conscious, uncontrolled, and secret exercise of power over the child by the adult, which is tolerated by society” (Prisoners of Childhood, page 69).

I guess that might not make for such inspirational reading in her little sycophantic circle. Here is the whole paragraph for your perusal.

Yield to the Unstemmable Stream

2012-01-31T11:43:00.006-06:00

I've mentioned before that I was raised Christian, hence my ambivalence. Maybe it's the overload of hypocrisy I was exposed to at a young age (backstory here), maybe it's the twistedness of mainstream Christianity in US culture - despite the forces that have shaped me into the agnostic who stands before you, I still find that the Gospel (with a capital G) resonates with me.

GKA left an interesting link on the post about whether Jesus would disown his child, and I found myself reading many of the commentaries about Matthew. This interpretation spoke to me:

"Jesus - withdrew himself from thence - It is the part of prudence and Christian charity not to provoke, if possible, the blind and the hardened; and to take from them the occasion of sin. A man of God is not afraid of persecution; but, as his aim is only to do good, by proclaiming every where the grace of the Lord Jesus, he departs from any place when he finds the obstacles to the accomplishment of his end are, humanly speaking, invincible, and that he can not do good without being the means of much evil. Yield to the stream when you cannot stem it."

I've always liked the way metaphor figures so prominently in the Bible. To stick around and provoke the blind and hardened becomes just as much a means of evil as the original blindness and hardness in question. Yielding to the N, if you take my meaning, doesn't mean submitting yourself to their cruelty. It means acknowledging him/her as an unstemmable stream, and departing from the insurmountable obstacle of their pride.

I also like how the notion of yielding here has the flavor of "honoring another person's self-determination," not one of domination or submission.

Now I know there are many people out there who, for whatever reason, do not currently have the option to depart. I think the wisdom here still applies: don't let another person's pride become your "occasion of sin," if you will. Sometimes all you can do is realize that the blind and hardened aren't going to change, and find ways to protect yourself from further harm.

Would Jesus Disown His Adult Child?

2012-01-29T14:05:00.003-06:00

Someone in Texas clicked my blog in their search results for this query:

should christian parents disown their adult children who make different choices?

The "should" looms large - odious little question, isn't it? We're either dealing with a parent or an adult child - there's no telling which way to fall on this one. Based on the "different choices" part (rather than the classic "disloyalty" or "hurtful" or "selfish" descriptors I see daily), could be a disowned adult child who wants to know whether his/her family acted out of Christian beliefs. Or a Christian parent Googling this because s/he WANTS to disown his/her adult son/daughter, not because they HAVE already and want to square it with Christianity.

Either way, I find it easy to channel Jesus on this one: "No, you shouldn't disown your son or daughter for making different choices." Or at least, not because you're a Christian! I mean seriously dudes, that's an easy one.

Withholding

2012-01-27T16:12:00.007-06:00

I'll never forget what a revelation it was to find words for the agony I felt in relation to NM: she withheld her love to punish me. I found these words with my brother, I think it was the first summer I was home from college. I remember the words just tumbling out: I felt like she didn't love me anymore whenever I disappointed her. I had lived so long with this inside, thinking I deserved it. I remember him comforting me, though he could not relate to how deeply affected I was by this particular dynamic. That tactic just didn't work on him. I envied his apparent strength. A "strength" he has the balls to flaunt as superiority in statements like these:

"Sure dad and I still struggle with mom's force, but unlike you, I actually developed a mature relationship with her, and didn't hold in my true feelings for 15 years and then explode in 'truth liberation.' I've been challenging her my whole life, and I'm proud in my ability to do it verbally, directly, and eye to eye."

Sure, the guy still living at home has the mature relationship with her.

I've always wanted to be as uneffected by her "force" as he seemed to be. Alas, it is my lot to be sensitive to rejection and abandonment.

Once in high school I nervously approached her because I thought I had a yeast infection. The mother who insisted on being in the room for every other goddamn doctor's visit of my life told me I'd have to make my own appointment. Shrugged me off like a goddamn leper. I remember shamefully sitting in the gown waiting for the doctor, naked down to my periwinkle blue socks, alone with womanhood and all its consequences. I felt punished, like I didn't deserve support because I had done sexual things to get myself into this predicament.

Another one that comes to mind is the summer I decided to stay at school instead of live at home. Those were the classes I had to pay for myself because I was depriving her of a summer of my companionship. It's not the actual paying for the classes I find problematic - it's the glaringly obvious way she punished me for going against her wishes. If I knew she'd expect a lifetime of compliance for her taking out loans for my undergraduate tuition - (and I quote, "we are going to be paying for your lifestyle and education for many years to come. We gave it with no strings but at least expected to be treated with dignity.") - I would have taken all the loans out myself. But I didn't have that choice.

Mom's force. The power to give, the power to withhold. She is the sun, we are the planets, orbiting around her.

Sometimes I think I'm withholding my love to punish her for doing it to me. A child's revenge. To show her how it fucking feels.

1/28/12 addendum from Claire (and her DH!): "'No, she really does treat you with complete disregard for your feelings and it's HEALTHY to not want to have a relationship with her.' Upsi, being true to yourself and not caving in to the demands of a narcissist is NOT petty or vengeful or childish. It's HEALTHY, ok?" - amen!

Irked

2012-01-25T13:28:00.003-06:00

I find myself irked by things NM repeated over and over during our "period of conflict" circa 2009: you are a coward for not facing me, you will never find peace until you face me, you are hiding, it's your fault you're in pain because you never told me, quit blaming all your problems on me, you've nurtured old hurts for so long, let it go already, there were plenty of good things, shame on you for making your father cry, shame on you for having negative feelings, shame on you for your anger...on and on.

This is the voice I contend with daily. When I am able to register it as HER voice, not mine, it helps a bit - but not much.

The part of me that wants to give voice to the inherent dignity in the way I handled my upbringing continues to argue with this forceful voice. The fact that I have these things now in writing from her does help me to bear witness to the cruelty of her parenting, but not enough to get out from under it.

The shame is the thing. Being shamed for having needs. Shamed for being legitimately afraid of her power to crush my spirit. Shame is the wallpaper that covers everything good about me, shame is the power a parent has over his/her child.

"What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Talk About It

2012-01-24T12:59:00.003-06:00

Special request via a Google search query:

upsi is a narcissist in denial. talk about that on your blog.

Someone in Phillie wanted me to discuss that I'm in denial about being a narcissist myself.

I am narcissistic, learned it from one of the best. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Out from Under

2012-01-24T12:40:00.000-06:00

I've been waiting for your love

your blessing

your acceptance.

I've been waiting for your permission

your understanding

your grace.

The weight of this waiting is mine to bear,

mine to crawl out from under.

Where once it was a boulder of immeasurable mass,

in coming alive, each movement sends faults up

into this crag. My grief blasts this rock into pebbles.

I need not amputate limbs to escape,

I can sit up and right myself. I need not remain

trapped under this illusory weight,

the livingness inside me will speak,

will move, will reach forward.

I will lift my fragile spirit from this place,

I will find my way out from under the

weight of what has been lost.

No love or permission or acceptance

can heal this longing. It is mine to bear,

to transform, to embrace.

I Quote, Therefore I Am?

2012-01-23T09:08:00.001-06:00

This weekend NM went on a blitz of quotation posting. Thought I'd share to give you a nice sampling. Enjoy!

“Whatever has not been reconciled in our mind we carry forth as a part of us that is lacking in order or harmony. Often the solution rests in allowing ourselves to perceive in a new way that is unencumbered by old ideas or outdated concepts.” -Ron Scott

"The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them." -P.D. Ouspensky

“The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well” -Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“Holding anger is like a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves,” -Mitch Albom

"A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep." -Vernon Howard

"Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like) ; fletchers bend the arrow ; carpenters bend a log of wood ; wise people fashion themselves." -Buddha (563 - 483 BC)

"The man who foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my most ungrudging love; and the more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from me." -Buddha (563 - 483 BC)

"Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge, and dares forgive an injury." -E.H. Chapin

"One day you will look back and see how easy it would have been if you had not decided to make it so hard." -Paradigm Shift

"So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key." -The Eagles

Worth It

2012-01-21T09:55:00.000-06:00

I did a post yesterday called "Wolf," and if you read it and are now wondering where it went, I took it down. I'll email it to you if you want to read it.

Why did I take it down? Just wasn't worth it. I feel like I have to speak in code to my readers here to explain, so I'll just say: wasn't worth it.

Haughty

2012-01-19T10:40:00.004-06:00

PWC's most recent post about the haughty air of narcissists set my wheels turning. This word, haughty, captures the essence of my mother. She is a proud woman. She believes herself to be enlightened. She created this FB page on her mission to "view the world through beauty, thought and inspiration," and it is a daily confirmation that she is a hypocritical, repressed, wanna-be guru. She's a special kind of narcissist, covert and highly strategic. So special she's sure she's not a narcissistic mother - a therapist told her so. She's been diagnosed mentally healthy and isn't afraid to shout it from the hilltops. I'm being completely serious - she told me she was diagnosed mentally healthy.

If there's anything she's committed her life to, it is having the "spiritual" upper hand. No matter how patently destructive her actions are, she'll find a way to remain the "better person" in her mind. From a Jungian perspective, she has disowned her shadow. And it takes quite a lot of work for her to keep it at bay. Lisette's wackadoodle annoying commentor bears a striking resemblance to my mother. I get this creepy feeling that they really believe they can simply eliminate negativity by willing it away.

The fact is, all that repressed negativity comes spewing up at the slightest provocation. The shadow will not bow to one's spiritual pretensions, it will not be denied. And then where's our holy-mother-of-goodness and light? Oh, riiiiight, she's only human, don't be so hard on her! It is a hypocrisy I can't abide.

Write your own goddamn poems!

2012-01-17T12:42:00.003-06:00

I put together this batch of search queries (that I couldn't make up if I tried) to demonstrate the kind of sentiment that people HIDE publicly, but reveal when they don't think anyone will see:

what does family estrangement say to others?
how to make my estranged adult child talk to me?

I hate my estranged daughter who cut me off
how can I get my estranged child to respond?

my stupid daughter chose estrangement
estranged adult children have no conscience

how to stop blaming yourself for estrangement from adult daughter
tell adult children to piss off

adult children who regret disowning their parents
when adult children withhold love

estrangement from adult son is disrupting the family
malignant narcissists, and common defense mechanism, "you don't appreciate me"

what is the secret of "reconciling" with a daughter?
I know you want to be estranged from us
she has no desire to reconcile but I want to

poem about children not calling their parents
"children stop blaming your parents" poem

Don't Hate on Hate

2012-01-16T22:14:00.001-06:00

I must share a most fabulously cogent piece on haters, hatin, and hatred itself. Source: Alice Miller.

What is Hatred?

Friday April 01, 2005

We tend to associate the word hatred with the notion of a dangerous curse we need to free ourselves of as quickly as we can. An opinion also frequently voiced is that hatred poisons our very being and makes it all but impossible to heal the injuries stemming from our childhood. I take a very different view of this matter, and this has led to frequent misunderstandings. Accordingly, my attempts to cast light on the phenomenon of hatred and to subject the concept to more searching scrutiny have not yet been very successful.

I too believe that hatred can poison the organism, but only as long as it is unconscious and directed vicariously at substitute figures or scapegoats. When that happens, hatred cannot be resolved. Suppose, for example, that I hate a specific ethnic group but have never allowed myself to realize how my parents treated me when I was a child, how they left me crying for hours in my cot when I was a baby, how they never gave me so much as a loving glance. If that is the case, then I will suffer from a latent form of hatred that can pursue me throughout my whole life and cause all kinds of physical symptoms. But if I know what my parents did to me in their ignorance and have a conscious awareness of my indignation at their behavior, then I have no need to re-direct my hatred at other persons. In the course of time, my hatred for my parents may weaken, or it may resolve itself temporarily, only to flare up again as a result of events in the present or new memories. But I know what this hatred is all about. Thanks to the feelings I have actively experienced, I now know myself well enough, AND I HAVE NO COMPULSION TO KILL OR HARM ANYONE BECAUSE OF MY FEELINGS OF HATRED.

We frequently meet people who are grateful to their parents for the beatings they received when they were little, or who assert that they have long since forgotten the sexual molestation they suffered at their hands. They say that in prayer they have forgiven their parents for their "sins." But at the same time, they feel a compulsion to resort to physical violence in the upbringing of their children and/or to interfere with them sexually. Every pedophile openly displays his "love" of children and has no idea that deep down he is avenging himself for the things done to him as a child. Though he is not consciously aware of this hatred, he is still subject to its dictates.
Such LATENT hatred is indeed dangerous and difficult to resolve because it is not directed at the person who has caused it but at substitute figures. Cemented in different kinds of perversion, it can sustain itself for life and represents a serious threat, not only to the environment of the person harboring it, but also to that person him/herself.

CONSCIOUS, REACTIVE hatred is different. Like any other feeling, this can recede and fade away once we have lived it through. If our parents have treated us badly, possibly even sadistically, and we are able to face up to the fact, then of course we will experience feelings of hatred. As I have said, such feelings may weaken or fade away altogether in the course of time, though this never happens from one day to the next. The full extent of the mistreatment inflicted upon a child cannot be dealt with all at once. Coming to terms with it is an extended process in which aspects of the mistreatment are allowed into our consciousness one after the other, thus rekindling the feeling of hatred. But in such cases, hatred is not dangerous. It is a logical consequence of what happened to us, a consequence only fully perceived by the adult, whereas the child was forced to tolerate it in silence for years.

Alongside reactive hatred of the parents and latent hatred deflected onto scapegoats, there is also the justified hatred for a person tormenting us in the present, either physically or mentally, a person we are at the mercy of and either cannot free ourselves of, or at least believe that we cannot. As long as we are in such a state of dependency, or think we are, then hatred is the inevitable outcome. It is hardly conceivable that a person being tortured will not feel hatred for the torturer. If we deny ourselves this feeling, we will suffer from physical symptoms. The biographies of Christian martyrs are full of descriptions of the dreadful ailments they suffered from, and a significant portion of them are skin diseases. This is how the body defends itself against self-betrayal. These "saints" were enjoined to forgive their tormentors, to "turn the other cheek," but their inflamed skin was a clear indication of the extreme anger and resentment they were suppressing.

Once such victims have managed to free themselves from the power of their tormentors, they will not have to live with this hatred day in, day out. Of course, the memories of their impotence and the horrors they went through may well up again on occasion. But it is probable that the intensity of their hatred will be tempered as time goes on. (I have discussed this aspect in more detail in my recent book "Our Body Never Lies - The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting", Norton, New York).

Hatred is only a feeling, albeit a very strong and assertive one. Like any other feeling, it is a sign of our vitality. So if we try to suppress it, there will be a price to pay. Hatred tries to tell us something about the injuries we have been subjected to, and also about ourselves, our values, our specific sensitivity. We must learn to pay heed to it and understand the message it conveys. If we can do that, we no longer need to fear hatred. If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.

The almost universal, but in fact highly destructive, injunction to forgive our "trespassers" encourages such self-betrayal. Religion and traditional morality constantly prize forgiveness as a virtue, and in numerous forms of therapy it is erroneously recommended as a path to "healing." But it is easy to demonstrate that neither prayer nor auto-suggestive exercises in "positive thinking" are able to counteract the body's justified and vital responses to humiliations and other injuries to our integrity inflicted on us in early childhood. The martyrs' crippling ailments are a clear indication of the price they had to pay for the denial of their feelings. So would it not be simpler to ask whom this hatred is directed at, and to recognize why it is in fact justified? Then we have a chance of living responsibly with our feelings, without denying them and paying for this "virtue" with illnesses.

I would be suspicious if a therapist promised me that after treatment (and possibly thanks to forgiveness) I would be free of undesirable feelings like rage, anger, or hatred. What kind of person would I be if I could not react, temporarily at least, to injustice, presumption, evil, or arrogant idiocy with feelings of anger or rage? Would that not be an amputation of my emotional life? If therapy really has helped me, then I should have access to ALL my feelings for the rest of my life, as well as conscious access to my own history as an explanation for the intensity of my responses. This would quickly temper that intensity without having serious physical consequences of the kind caused by the suppression of emotions that have remained unconscious.

In therapy, I can learn to understand my feelings rather than condemn them, to regard them as friends and protectors instead of fearing them as something alien that needs to be fought against. Though our parents, teachers, or priests may have taught us to practice such self-amputation, we must ultimately realize that it is in fact very dangerous. There can be no doubt that we are then the victims of severe mutilation.

There are still countries where physical correction is part and parcel of the acknowledged approach to "upbringing." But no teacher will beat the children entrusted to his care unless he himself was beaten as a child and forced to learn to suppress his anger. He will take it out on the children in the class without knowing why he does so. I believe that awareness of this fact could save many children from exposure to such brutality. And if statesmen had a genuine awareness of their own personal histories, this would spare whole nations the effects of their ignorance and cruelty.

It is not our feelings that make us a danger to ourselves and our environment, it is the dissociation of those feelings caused by our fear of them. It is here that we must seek the reasons for amok killers, for suicide bombers, and for the countless court judges who close their eyes to the real causes of crime, so as to spare the parents of the delinquents and to keep their own histories in the dark.

Moving On

2012-01-12T10:46:00.013-06:00

Have you ever noticed that the edict to "move on" or "get over it" is frequently issued by none other than the brazen reprobates spreading so much misery in the first place?

Who is anyone to define what "moving on" looks like for someone else? All too often, this sentiment amounts to silencing. It is used to belittle. It is the expression of discomfort with someone else's process, as if any of us has the right to dictate when it is time to move on.

Today I'm affirming you, whoever you may be, Gentle Reader, in your work to understand, to heal, and to grow. It's okay to be exactly where you are. Yielding to the demand (read: pressure) to "let it go" is a betrayal of your very self if you are still working through whatever it is someone else wants you to let go. Listen to your innermost self. Listen to the part of you that needs to grieve. Listen to the voice inside that encourages justice, that holds on to the truth because letting it go is an injustice.

When you have mourned, you will naturally find release.

Don't let anyone tell you what timeline is right for you.

Sometimes what looks like "holding on" to one person IS another person's way of moving on. Respect yourself. Respect your needs. I feel an En Vogue chorus coming on..."free your mind, and the rest will follow."

Giggles

2012-01-11T11:53:00.000-06:00

I've been so goddamn giggly the past few days, it's like my funny bone is working overtime. I was lying in bad last night, trying to fall asleep, and out of the blue started giggling about this time that I accidentally crashed the family van into the fridge in our garage while parking. Between the van and the fridge were these big jugs of water, and they splashed up like an explosion. It suddenly struck me as so funny, just out of nowhere. I guess having excessive giggles is better than weeping round the clock? I wonder if the two are cosmic twins, giggling and crying?

And the other thing getting me giggly is that I'm still on-the-mend from a cold, and my laugh is all gravelly and full of yuckyness, so DH has been calling me Gladys. So the Gladys laugh itself makes me laugh, and it's just a loop. He had me rolling around laughing as he made up a Wizard of Oz motif for all the GOP candidates, of course Romney would be the Wizard - pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Laughing feels so good, even if it's all Gladys-ey.

Abandonment

2012-01-10T12:27:00.002-06:00

How could I have been expected to know that when NM withdrew her love to punish me that "of course" she still loved me? This punishment didn't leave physical scars, but it tore up every inch of my little upsi soul, it terrified me, it made me fear the next time she'd go cold "because" of something I did. And I blamed myself the way she blamed me, because I was supposed to know that of course she loved me. I was supposed to know, I was supposed to understand, I was supposed to adapt.

The one thing I couldn't do without was her love. And that was what she pulled off the table.

Now I'm not a child and I can live without her love. I don't have to fear the next punishment. In fact, her love wasn't meant for me as I am, but for me as her perfect object, her little loving mother, her doll, herself. And I could have spent my life waiting for her to love me, ME, and for what? To be hurt all over again when she just "can't understand" how I feel?

Alice Miller said "Waiting for love is not love."

I'm not waiting for what isn't coming.

No Pill for This

2012-01-09T11:51:00.001-06:00

I haven't taken my anti-depressants since Thursday. This is the fifth day I haven't taken them. I decided, after taking them for 5 years and still feeling this wall between me and myself, that perhaps they are not a long term solution to my depression. Something that helped me to not want to kill myself is now keeping me from connecting to the reasons for my depression. Alice Miller's writings on the topic of depression really made me start thinking about why I take them and whether they are now another barrier to accessing my genuine feelings.

More times than I can count over the years I've been "upset" - in tears, despairing - but completely unaware of the root of the feeling. Unaware of why I am so upset. Baffled by myself, confused and unable to make sense of the intensity of my feelings and reactions.

I find myself quite tearful today, trying not to cry at work. I just had to go to the bathroom to rally, give myself a little pep talk. I did tell my psychiatrist my plans, and we'll see how this goes.

I know that I can bear the truth. I will keep you posted.

Violence Kills Love

2012-01-06T14:25:00.003-06:00

If you've never read this interview with Alice Miller, I'm posting it here for your perusal.

A word of warning: I completely agree with Alice Miller that spanking children is wrong, and do not intend this post to be a debate as to its alleged merits. I will post comments as I always do, but want to issue this warning because the topic is quite provocative for even the most "enlightened" parents who are often more interested in warding off their own guilt than facing the truth. And yes, we were spanked as children in my family.

Violence Kills Love:

Spanking, the Fourth Commandment, and the Suppression of Authentic Emotions

Interview given by Alice Miller to Borut Petrovic Jesenovec in June 2005 for the magazine ONA (Slovenia)

You have found out that the Fourth Commandment ("Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother") is detrimental to the healthy emotional life of a child. This will be quite shocking for many people. How did you discover that the only function of this 'honorable injunction' is in fact manipulation and subordination of the child?

The commandment is not detrimental to the child but later to the adult. All children love their parents and they wouldn't need the commandment to tell them to do so. But when we become adults and realize that our love was exploited and we were abused, we should be able to experience our true feelings, including rage, and not be forced to love parents who were cruel to us. Most people are afraid of these "negative" feelings towards their parents, so they take them out on their children and in this way perpetuate the cycle of violence. It is here that I see the destructive effect of the fourth commandment. Since a commandment or a law that would inhibit parents to dump their anger on their offspring doesn't yet exist, even the parents' most violent behavior can still be called "child rearing".

You go so far as to state that the fourth commandment causes physical ailments. How would you explain this link? Did it cause physical ailments in your case?

It is the suppression of authentic emotions that makes us ill. We suppress them out of fear. The child's unconscious fear of violent parents can stay with us our whole life if we refuse to confront it by staying in a state of denial.

We take it for granted that parents 'love' their children. Unfortunately, this is more often than not a myth. Is love, seasoned with 'only' occasional 'educational' spanking, possible?

As parents we should know that violent upbringing, however well intended, kills love.

Why is spanking always wrong?

Spanking is always an abuse of power. It is humiliating and it creates fear. A state of fear can only teach children to be distrustful and hide their true feelings. They learn from their parents that violence is the right way of resolving conflicts and that they are bad or unworthy and thus deserve correction. These children will soon forget why they were spanked. They will submit very quickly, but later in life, they will do the same to weaker persons. By spanking we teach violence. The child's body has learned the lesson of violence from their parents over a long period and we cannot expect it to suddenly forget these lessons at the behest of religious values, which the body doesn't understand anyway. Instead, it retains the memory of being spanked.

Many despicable acts are committed in the name of parental love. How would you define real parental love?

I love my children if I can respect them with their feelings and their needs and try to fulfill these needs as well as I can. I don't love them if I see them not as persons equal to me but as objects that I have to correct.

You speak of child abuse in our cultures as A Forbidden Issue. Why is this so? What is needed to change this state of affairs?

The issue is forbidden because most of us were spanked in childhood and we don't want to be reminded of that. We learned as children that spanking is harmless. We had to learn this lie in order to survive. Now, as adults, we don't want to know the truth, that in fact spanking is harmful. It is interesting that when you say 'don't spank your child' people become aggressive with you. They become even more aggressive if you say 'you were spanked yourself and suffered as a child, you were forced to deny your pain in order to survive'. They would rather kill you than admit the truth and feel the pain of having been humiliated and unloved when they were spanked by someone five times bigger than themselves. These aggressive reactions are understandable. Imagine how you would feel if you went out on the street and suddenly somebody five times bigger than you beat you in a rage and you didn't even understand why. A child cannot bear this truth, it must repress it. But an adult can face up to it. As adults we are not so alone, we can look for witnesses and we have a consciousness we didn't have when we were children.

You say that hatred is better than the adoration of abusive parents, because it is a sign of our vitality. With regard to their parents many people find themselves trapped in a chain of self-deception (they idealize them). How can we direct hatred, rage and anger at the proper recipient (and not at ourselves or our partners)?

We can try to become emotionally honest with ourselves and find the courage to confront the reality of our childhood. Unfortunately there are not many people who really want to know what happened in the first years of their lives. But their number seems to be growing. Some years ago we created forums in different languages on the Internet. They are called 'our childhood'. Adults who were abused as children and who want to know more precisely what happened to them and how they actually feel about it can share their memories with other survivors in a safe environment and get more and more in touch with their true histories. Thanks to the compassion of the feeling witnesses they achieve more emotional clarity that helps them to change the way they treat their children. Of course, they become also more authentic with their partners once they understand better the causes of their strong emotions that were previously repressed.

One of the basic psychological truths is that persons emotionally deprived in childhood hope all their lives to receive the love denied to them. Why is it so hard to accept that we weren't important to anyone? Many even prefer to commit suicide instead.

Yes, you are quite right. Some prefer to commit suicide or willingly accept a chronic illness and some prefer to become dictators over whole nations, or serial murderers, and to show to others what they learned as children (violence, cruelty, and perversion), rather than acknowledge their early deprivation. The more deprived and mistreated people were in their childhood, the more they stay attached to their parents, waiting for them to change. They also seem to be stuck with their fear. This fear of the tormented child makes any kind of rebellion unthinkable, even if the parents are already dead.

While we are on the subject, Slovenia is famous for its high percentage of suicides. How would you tackle this problem?

Suicide is always the consequence of denied suffering in childhood, as is depression. I have written an article about depression, which you can read on my website. There I refer to many examples of very successful stars, such as Dalida for instance, the famous Egyptian singer, who in their lives got everything they wanted and were admired and famous. But in the middle of their lives they became depressive and many committed suicide. In all these cases it was not the present that made them suffer, it was the denied traumas of their childhood that made them feel miserable because they were never consciously acknowledged. The body was left alone with its knowledge.

How do you think morality and ethics come about? Why does someone become (im)moral?

Never by preaching, only by experience. Ethical values are not transmitted by words, not even by the most holy words, only by experience. Nobody is born wicked. It is ridiculous to think, as people thought in the Middle Ages, that the devil put a wicked child into the family, which should correct it by spanking, so that it could become a decent person. A tormented child will become a tormentor and certainly a cruel parent unless in childhood he/she found a helping witness, a person with whom they could feel safe, loved, protected, respected and thanks to these experiences learn what love can be. Then such a child will not become a tyrant; he/she will then be able to respect other people and have empathy for them. It is very significant that in the childhood of all dictators I have examined, I didn't find even one helping witness. The child thus glorified the violence it had endured.

Religious education teaches us to forgive our tormentors. Should we really forgive them? Is it in fact possible to do so?

It is understandable that we want to forgive and forget and not to feel the pain, but this outcome doesn't work. It turns out sooner or later that this is not an outcome at all. Take the many sexual abusers among the people of the Church. They have forgiven their parents for sexual abuse or other abuses of their power. But what are many of them doing? They are repeating the "sins" of their parents BECAUSE they have forgiven them. If they could consciously condemn the deeds of their parents they wouldn't be urged to do the same, to molest and to confuse children by forcing them to stay silent - as if this was the most normal thing to do and not a crime. They just deceive themselves. Religions can have an enormous power over our minds and force us to many kinds of self-deception. But they have not the slightest influence on our body, which knows perfectly well our true emotions and insists on respecting them.

Is compassion for Milosevic or Saddam Hussein acceptable?

I have always had compassion for children but never for an adult tyrant. Here, I have sometimes been misunderstood, especially when I described the childhood of Adolf Hitler. Some readers didn't understand that I could feel compassion for the infant but never for the adult Hitler, who became a monster exactly because he denied how he suffered from being severely humiliated by his father (who by the way was an illegal child of a Jew). (See For Your Own Good). As a child Adolf Hitler was of course unable to defend his dignity but he also remained submissive in adulthood. He feared and honored his father his whole life, suffered from attacks of panic at night, and his immense hatred was directed at all Jews and half-Jews.

The fiercest adorers of their parents are those who were the most emotionally deprived by them. There is a very cruel mechanism at work here and it produces a very pessimistic vision of life. Is there hope for the badly wounded?

I don't think that my view is pessimistic. On the contrary, I think that if we can understand how the cycle of violence functions we can share our knowledge with others and cooperate in putting a stop to it. But if we believe that people are born with genes that make them violent, we can't change anything. Although this opinion is highly pessimistic and feeble-minded, many so-called intelligent individuals share it. I have never got an answer to my question why so many "genetically" defective persons should have been born under the rule of Hitler in Germany or of Milosevic in Serbia. The reasons for these misleading ideas are always the same: people prefer to believe in genes than to see how their parents treated them and to feel the pain. But by feeling the pain they could liberate themselves from the compulsion to repeat and thus become responsible adults. This statement is by no means pessimistic.

Is there hope for those who don't find a witness?

An informative book can also function as a witness. The more we speak and write about this problem, the more witnesses will be available in the world, well-informed witnesses who can help children to feel respected and safe and help adults to bear their truth. Denial not only urges us to repeat, it also consumes a great deal of energy. Illnesses, eating disorders and substance addictions are the consequences.

Positive thinking is just as harmful as religious injunctions to forgive and love those who hate us. Should we avoid new age self-help manuals?

Yes, you are right. "Positive thinking" is in no sense a remedy, as it is a form of self-deception, it is a flight from the truth and cannot help because the body knows better. In my recently published article on my website, "What is Hatred?" I explain this point more extensively. I do the same in my latest book, which will soon be published in your language.

What are the political consequences of your writing?

They could be beneficial indeed if politicians were not afraid of confronting the truth of their childhood. Emotionally, most of them are 2-year-old children who were never loved and respected as the persons they were, with their feelings and needs, even if some of them were admired for their skills. They deny their frustrations of the past and are looking for loving parents in the persons of their voters. The more money they get for the election campaign, the more they feel loved. But as this "love" can never make up for the absence of love the child of a strict, cold, demanding, and resentful mother had to suffer, the struggle for love can never stop. And thousands of people will pay the price.

The political consequences of my writing are not yet understood by many. People love to see human cruelty as a mystery and to consider it as innate. Also some ideologies seem good enough to cover the actual reasons for cruelty. Look what happened in Yugoslavia when Serbian soldiers were allowed to take revenge for the denied pain of children beaten in their early years. Milosevic gave them the permission to do so, and this was enough. There was no need for any instructions for cruelty; the soldiers had them in their bodies. For years they had been exposed to cruelty as children and were never allowed to react. Now they could take revenge on innocents, pretending that they were fighting for an ethnic cause. Equally, millions of Germans who were beaten into submission as Children became sadistic and perverted adults as soon as they were allowed by Hitler's regime to act in this way.

25 years ago, in my book ("For your Own Good"), "Am Anfang war Erziehung", I showed how all the Germans were brought up who as adults followed Adolf Hitler. At that time people thought it was necessary to beat a child as soon as possible, immediately after birth, so that they would become 'decent' people. Now, thanks to increasing research on the child's brain in the last ten years we know that the structure of the brain is USE-DEPENDENT. Each human being is born with a brain that is not yet fully structured, it takes at least the first three years to complete this process. According to the early experiences of the child (whether he receives love or cruelty), his brain will be structured. So you must not be surprised that in countries where beating small children is allowed and customary, wars and even genocide and terrorism seem inevitable. For that reason we must adopt a law forbidding corporal punishment of children, as some European countries have already done. Unfortunately, these are only small countries and the bigger ones like the United States are far from considering such a law. There, physical correction for children at school is permitted in as many as 22 states.

From the web site www.nospank.net you can learn that spanking at home and paddling in schools still seem self-evident to American people. They were spanked and paddled and now they insist on their RIGHT to do the same with their offspring. There is hope however that this important web site and others like it will bring about a change sooner or later. The links between so-called "educational" violence and atrocities in our "political" life today have become so obvious to some people that they can't be silenced forever. One day everyone will know that human cruelty is not innate, that it is produced and learned in childhood.

The FIRST commandment should say: "Honor your children so they wouldn't need later to build inside themselves walls of protection against old pain and to defend themselves against phantom enemies with awful weapons that can destroy the world."

What is wrong with current psychoanalytic practice? Why were you 'expelled' from the psychological movement?

I was not expelled from the psychological movement; I just challenged their traditional view of thinking and their denial of childhood suffering. I eventually had to admit that psychoanalysis is no exception in this respect. The way in which Freud used the story of Oedipus is very significant. It shows very clearly the betrayal of the child and the tendency to protect the parents. Freud seems to have forgotten that Oedipus was first a victim of his parents and was pushed by them into the role of a "sinner." His parents sent him away as a very small child. It is quite enlightening to read the true story of Oedipus. You can also find it on my website in an article written in German by Thomas Gruner.

As to the current psychoanalytical practice I think that the protection of parents has been assured by some rules like for instance neutrality (instead of partiality with the victim) as well as by focusing on fantasies (instead of a confrontation with the reality of a cruel upbringing). You can find my recent articles on these issues also on my website.

You describe the emotional life of quite a few of the most highly regarded writers of the modern age. Who would you cite as the example of a hero who successfully overcame the traumatic conflict with his/her parents?

This is a very interesting question that nobody has asked me before. I have been looking around for a long time but I cannot find even one well-known writer who doesn't believe that we must eventually forgive our parents. Even if they see the cruelty of their upbringing they feel guilty for seeing it. Franz Kafka was one of the bravest writers on this subject but at that time nobody could support his knowledge. So he felt guilty and died as a very young man, like Proust, Rimbaud, Schiller, Cechov, Nietzsche and so many others who began to grasp the truth but were scared of it. Why is it so difficult to bear the truth of having been abused in childhood? Why do we rather blame ourselves? Because blaming ourselves protects us from the pain. I think that the worst pain we must experience in order to become emotionally honest is to admit that we were never loved when we needed it most. It is easy to say this but it is very, very hard to feel it. And to accept it. To get rid of the expectation that one-day my parents will change and will love me. However, in contrast to children, adults can get rid of this illusion - to the benefit of their health and their offspring.

People who absolutely want to know their truth can do it. And I do think that these individuals will change the world. They will not be "heroes", they might be quite modest people but there is no doubt that their emotional honesty will once be able to break down the wall of ignorance, denial and violence. The pain of not being loved is only a feeling; a feeling is never destructive when it is directed at the person who caused the pain. Then even hatred is not destructive as long as it is conscious and not acted out. But it can be very destructive, even very dangerous, for oneself and others, if it is denied and directed at scapegoats.

Jesus as a Child

2012-01-05T17:12:00.003-06:00

I want to share a passage from Alice Miller's book "The Truth Will Set You Free," a passage that brought me to spontaneous, unexpected tears.

"The figure of Jesus confounds all those principles of poisonous pedagogy still upheld in the christian churches, notably the use of punishment to make children obedient and the emotional blindness such treatment inevitably brings. Long before his birth Jesus received the greatest reverence, love, and protection from his parents, and it was in this initial and all-important experience that his rich emotional life, his thinking, and his ethics were rooted. His earthly parents saw themselves as his servants, and it would never have occurred to them to lay a finger on him. Did that make him selfish, arrogant, covetous, high-handed or conceited? Quite the contrary.

Jesus grew into a strong, aware, empathic, and wise person able to experience and sustain strong emotions without being engulfed by them. He could see through insincerity and mendacity and he had the courage to expose them for what they were. Yet to my knowledge no representative of the church has ever admitted the patent connection between the character of Jesus and the way he was brought up. Would it not make eminent sense to encourage believers to follow the example of Mary and Joseph and regard their children as the children of God (which in a sense they are) rather than treating them as their own personal property? The image of God entertained by children who have received love is a mirror of their very first experiences. Their God will understand, encourage, explain, pass on knowledge, and be tolerant of mistakes. He will never punish them for their curiosity, suffocate their creativity, seduce them, give them incomprehensible commands, or strike fear in their hearts. Jesus, who in Joseph had just such a father, preached precisely those virtues...

...Children given the respect they deserve from their earliest years will go through life with open eyes and ears, prepared to fight injustice, stupidity, and ignorance with arguments and constructive action. Jesus did this at the age of twelve, and the scene in the temple (Luke 2:41-52) demonstrates eloquently that, if need be, he could refuse the obedience his parents asked of him without hurting their feelings.

With the best will in the world we cannot truly emulate the example of Jesus. None of us were carried by our mothers as the child of God; indeed, for far too many parents, children are merely a burden. What we can do, provided we really want to, is learn from the attitude displayed by Joseph and Mary. They did not demand docility from their son, they felt no urge to inflict violence on him. Only if we fear the confrontation with our own histories will we need to have power over others and cling to it with all our might. And if we do that it is because we feel too weak to be true to ourselves and our own feelings. But being honest to our children will make us strong. In order to tell the truth we do not need to have power over others. Power is something we only need in order to spread lies and hypocrisy, to mouth empty words and pretend they are true" (pp. 192-193).

Have you ever thought about Jesus this way, as a child of loving earthly parents, profoundly valued and respected?

Another Post on Forgiveness

2012-01-03T11:52:00.010-06:00

I came across a little Q&A about forgiveness that seems like a fitting topic now that the holidays have blown over. I also suspect that my NM would read something like this, and so I would like to take a closer look. The question is about trying to unite family during the holidays, specifically how to help his/her family "overcome past fights and come together for the holidays." The answer Joseph Grenny gives is essentially: you can't. Here it is in full:

I was thinking about your question last week while I took my morning run in the National Mall in Washington, DC. As I ran past the wonderful new Martin Luther King memorial, I screeched to a halt in front of a granite inscription that read, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
I’ve ruminated ever since on the implications of that powerful concept for your situation. Here are some thoughts I hope will help:

1. Patience is the most genuine expression of love. The first thing to keep in mind is that you cannot force forgiveness. You can’t compel other people to soften their hearts, examine their own faults, or modify their judgments of others. You have to wait until they want to.

Allowing them to go through the process of challenging their own emotions is an authentic expression of your love for them. It reflects your willingness to patiently wait for the family unity you crave so they can go through the natural process of human growth. Attempting to force the process is more likely to create resistance than reform. Watch—but wait—for signs that others feel some of the loss you feel, then make gentle attempts to help them move forward.

2. Forgiveness is the natural result of a new story. We can’t feel differently toward others until we think differently about them—and ourselves. Forgiveness is difficult because we stay stuck in the story we’ve told ourselves about what happened. As long as we maintain a picture of others’ villainy and our own virtue, we feel morally justified in our anger or frustration. We take delight in the suffering we hope the other person is feeling from our withheld affection because we perversely imagine they deserve to suffer or that the suffering is a learning experience. “Perhaps,” we reason, “this mutual misery will help them see the error of their ways and become a better human being. I’m a wonderful person for helping them have this life-changing experience!”

Until we intentionally examine our own faults and others’ virtues, we feel no need to forgive. The instant we begin this painful but wonderful process, the icy feelings inside us begin to melt. If we continue that process to its natural end, feelings of forgiveness are inevitable. Changing your story is the key to changing your feelings. Don’t try to get others to forgive. Instead, help them to challenge their stories. Forgiveness will follow.

3. We’ll challenge what we think when we change what we want. Given that challenging our stories is a painful process, why would anyone do so? We do it when our motives change. That’s why the first principle of Crucial Conversations is start with heart. When your motives change, your behavior follows naturally. People who resist forgiving are sometimes stuck in self-justifying stories—stories that protect them from the pain of reexamining their view of themselves and others. Sadly, the primary motivator that drags our story into the light is the acute experience of the pain of a lost relationship.

Now, I know your question wasn’t about helping yourself forgive, but about facilitating that process in others. So how can we use the principles I outlined above to influence others to forgive? First, don’t rush them. That just distracts them from experiencing the pain that could motivate them to change. Second, acknowledge their pain. Affirm the parts of their story you agree with and the hurt they legitimately feel. Third, invite motivation. Let them know you miss the family gatherings and guess they do, too. Tell them you think there is a way back to the former intimacy if they are open to discussion. Then be patient again. Periodically reaffirm the invitation, but don’t badger. When they’re ready, they’ll let you know.

One of two things might happen if you are patient and supportive. First, your family members may just bury the past and reconnect without resolving anything. Perhaps this is an acceptable compromise if all are happy with it. Second, they may respond to your invitation to help. If they take the second route, this will be your big opportunity for a crucial conversation. I’d suggest you invite them to share their story, then request the chance to share a different view of things. Be clear up front that your intent is to help them see what happened differently so they can feel differently, and gain their consent for this process before you dive into it. If they seem resistant, withdraw and assure them you aren’t trying to force your view on them. If they are going to change their minds, they will have to invite your influence in doing so.

Our judgments or demands of others won’t drive out their stories—just like hate cannot drive out hate and darkness cannot drive out darkness—only love and light can do that. While I don’t think there is any special brilliance in these modest suggestions, I hope you discern the heart of them—patience, love, and an appeal to what they really want is the only path to helping people reappraise their stories and reconnect with loved ones.

Stuck in the story we've told ourselves of "what happened," eh? This is the battleground in N families: who decides "what happened" and "how it went." The biggest pressure on "dissenters" who call bullshit on the family image/myth is to "stop focusing on the negative," that "nobody is perfect" and that "everybody makes mistakes" and they "did the best they could" (we could go on and on here).

Grenny's perspective, that challenging our own stories about ourselves and others is the path to forgiveness, takes aim at the very thing that has helped many ACoNs to come OUT of the haze of self-blame: listening to one's feelings, honoring one's experience. This line particularly troubles me: "Changing your story is the key to changing your feelings. Don’t try to get others to forgive. Instead, help them to challenge their stories. Forgiveness will follow."

I think Alice Miller would question this directive to "help" others challenge their stories. What kind of advice is this? My "story" has been challenged sixty ways to Sunday, my feelings have been invalidated, dismissed, belittled, and mocked. The pressure I have experienced from my FOO to change my feelings and change my story has been more painful for me than the loss of our connection.

That is my point here: My FOO's invalidation has been more painful for me than our estrangement. I don't feel pleasure "withholding" my affection and I'm not trying to teach my family a lesson, much as I have been accused of both.

I think many who read this blog have gone through similar experiences. The advice above is all-well-and-good for people who have experienced the loss of connection with family as the most painful aspect of their situation. In that case, all parties, motivated by similar feelings of loss and desire to "reconnect," have a starting point.

For those of us who have dealt with narcissism in our families, this advice easily becomes another weapon in the hands of the narc, likely to gloss over the parts where Grenny advises not to badger, force, or push. There is no starting point with a narcissist - no matter what you feel, if it threatens them in the least, you're wrong. "Forgetting the past" is just the resolution they want, and having a dialogue is not gonna happen. I can hear NM offering me a "different perspective" to "help" me feel differently. I can see her aligning herself with love and light, relegating me to the darkness and hatred of my negativity and unforgivingness. Another tool in the N-arsenal of ALWAYS maintaining the moral high ground, the upper hand, and the "I know better than you" worldview. God forbid she humble herself, relate as an equal, or consider that others have valid experiences and perspectives that differ from her own.

And where is repentance in all this wishy-washy feel-good talk? Not a single mention of apology, remorse, contrition, or amends! Just strategic advice to "acknowledge their pain." What the fuck does that mean if you're really trying to get someone to change their feelings and their story? What the fuck does that mean if you caused a person's pain to begin with? Somehow I don't think there is room in Grenny's perspective for legitimate anger and frustration.

I'd like to hear your take on this advice on forgiveness, any thoughts?

The Holiday Season

2011-12-23T12:05:00.006-06:00

DLK left the following comment on this post, and I wanted to share it as a meditation on the holidays:

I actually had a weird (although not unexpected) experience tonight. I've just come through a 6th knee surgery for a systemic disease that I've had since I was 11 and has always punctuated my life every 5 years or so. I can barely walk for months during this time. I'm just coming out of it again, but know I will eventually need to go on chemotherapy and other drugs indefinitely. Imagine going through all this with a 2-year-old and no family around to help.

So a few weeks ago I sent out our holiday photo XMAS cards and again sent her one, even though she stopped sending them 2 years ago, when we became estranged after my son's birth. We recently moved and I wasnt sure if I should put my return address on the envelope. But I decided to rise above it.

Tonight a package came in the mail for Jack. In the past, it's usually said it's from her but had no message or note. This time, it didnt even say it was from her.

She's a friend on my Facebook page, so I posted a thank-you to the anonymous person who sent it. Moments later, my teenage nephew's girlfriend emailed me, saying it was my mother, but she (the girlfriend) didn't feel comfortable commenting on my post, b/c my mother would see it and be "pissed."

Considering the time that's passed and my health issues, it still blows my mind that she's holding onto this crap and thinks she's in the right. She actually wants an apology from me for telling her 2 years ago I was upset she didnt come for my son's birth.

Sick, sick, sick.

Sending healing vibes to you, DLK, as you recover from your surgery. The holidays do bring out the truth, however much others work to conceal it. I don't know why this time of year has that effect, but it seems to imbue everything with a deeper level of meaning.

As we all wrap up for the week, plunging headlong into another Christmas, stories like DLK's abound. Try as we may to search out the highroad, we are left with few options. To acknowledge or not acknowledge the "anonymous" gift? And of course the various family members inside or outside of the orbit of our lovely narcs will have their part to play, too. We hear things through the grapevine, loyalties are exposed, "sides" are inevitably shored up. And it all has the capacity to bring us to our knees in misery. Why can't we have the experience we're "supposed" to have during this time of year?

We can't have what we don't have. And as we work to accept that, I think it frees us from the trap of misery set to ensnare those expecting something that is, in fact, impossible. It frees us to see what we DO have, to allow ourselves to feel what we feel, be it lonely or ecstatic. Honor your experience. The freedom to celebrate - it belongs to each of us. "They" can do it their way - we have the freedom to do it our way. When our paths do not align, we have the freedom to simply affirm that truth and act accordingly. That is the kindest thing we can do.

Acceptance frees us to light our own fires, rather than wait for others to bring us light. I'm thinking of a dear friend and fellow ACoN who will be alone this Christmas. She would rather be alone than subject herself to the annual Narco-Glory-Fest. She plans to light candles in church and pray. I imagine her tender spirit reaching for love and acceptance, and I want the universe to answer her call. The strength that it takes to courageously stand up for oneself like this is more meaningful to me than any phony Christmas party.

Light your candles. Warm yourself by the fire of your courage and strength. The rest of it - the disappointment and absence - it only has power over you if you allow it to. Before we know it, it will be January 1st, it will be over. For now, let your spirit be light - as the carol goes - our troubles can be out of sight.

Confidence in Oneself

2011-12-21T12:27:00.008-06:00

"To be authentic means to own all thoughts and feelings, including those that are socially unacceptable. Self-esteem is based on one's capacity to be authentic. When one disowns part of oneself, self esteem is lost and with it confidence. [Alice] Miller (1981) used the term, 'vibrancy', to refer to this state of psychological health in which people accept themselves instead of relying on others to accept them."

-Maureen Neihart, from "Preserving the true self of the gifted child"

"...the struggle to become an independent human, essentially to develop a sense of self-agency, risks provoking catastrophic retaliation from parents who are unable to relate to their children as separate, independent beings. These are parents whose own failure to individuate, or in attachment theory terms, to develop a secure autobiographical self, means that they depend on the responses of others, including their own child, to maintain a sense of their own identity."

-Jean Knox, from "The fear of love: the denial of the self in relationship"

One paradox of human existence is that although the healthy development of confidence in ourselves has its origins in our earliest relationships with our caretaker(s), as adults, we cannot "get" true self-confidence from others. Put another way: confidence in oneself (or lack thereof) begins as part of a relationship, but its eventual realization lies in our individuality, our singular work to (re)claim it. We must fill our own deficits, fight to continue our development, and take ownership of who we are. We need support, we need others - that was never in doubt - but we don't need others to give us confidence. The fantasy that it is possible for another to give us confidence in ourselves must go back to our infancy, when it WAS possible.

As utterly helpless infants, we depend on our caretaker(s) to feel secure. Specifically, "It is in his mother's eyes that the infant should find the valid and effective mirror which will reflect back to him his own, true image. This can then implant in him for the rest of his life the faith that he exists, that he is alive and fundamentally 'acceptable'" (Gordon, 266).

If that was not the case for you, self-confidence is probably a struggle. The paradox lies in that seductive idea that if-only-mother-would-validate-me, if only someone would acknowledge my right to feel, to experience, to perceive, if only someone ELSE had confidence in me, I could have confidence in myself.

That right there is a major mind-fuck.

We need our caretakers to help us learn to accept ourselves, but their failures (inevitable or otherwise) impair our ability to do so. These failures get embedded in the intergenerational muck that is passed down. Anyone daring enough to wake up and try to break this cycle will find themselves the inheritor of lifetimes of disowned mental contents.

Which brings me to an example. In a letter NM sent me early in our exchanges, she said this:

"I’m not going to challenge because now I’ve become less assertive – ineffective in my own confidence as a mother – and I am working to address this behavior."

All remarks aside about her alleged work to address her behavior, I want to draw out her comment about her confidence as a mother. To get where I'm going with this, I need to point to one more remark she made in that letter:

"But to be continually rejected is hard – to be rejected by my own beautiful daughter is confusing and I can only internalize it as I have failed you. Failing my own daughter is beyond pain."

So let's get this straight: My distancing from the family caused NM to lose her confidence as a mother. My rejection of her caused her to "internalize that she has failed me," which caused her immense pain.

This is what I see: I am held responsible for maintaining her identity. I am asked to carry the burden of her self-confidence. Her experience is valid, mine is not. It's like she's saying if I pretended that she hasn't failed me, I would magically spare her all this pain.

That's not how it works. I am not her mother, she is my mother. I will not allow myself to be pulled along this dysfunctional path any further than I've already gone. She has looked to me for acceptance and identity for as long as I've existed, and those shackles are not mine to bear. I needed those things from her, during crucial periods of my development, and I can never go back and get them. They are lost forever. I can work through the loss, I can recover my inner world, my vitality - but I can never go back and get what I needed at the time I needed it. And neither can she. Her refusal to deal with her own history will not be my fate. I am doing the work to mourn that loss so that if I become a mother, I'll have more to offer my child than my own needs.

I have my own self-confidence to work on, I cannot be responsible for hers too.

References*

Gordon, R. (1985). Big self and little self: Some reflections. Journal of Analytic Psychology. 30: 261-271.

Knox, J. (2007). The fear of love: The denial of the self in relationship. Journal of Analytic Psychology. 52: 543-563.

Neihart, M. (1998). Preserving the true self of the gifted child. Roeper Review. 20(3).

*I have a PDF copy of Gordon and Knox if you're interested, and HTML full text of Neihart - just shoot an email if you'd like any or all to read for yourself :) upsi.dancer [at] gmail.com

Blanket & Bathtub

2011-12-16T10:18:00.002-06:00

I realized the other day that I no longer sleep with my childhood blanket. After pondering a bit, I made the connection that my no-longer-needing-it coincides roughly with my Truth Campaign. I put it into a drawer to protect it from the cats more than a year ago, and haven't really thought about what a big step that is for me.

My "blankey," as I've always called it, went to college with me, into marriage with me, and has always been a cherished comfort object. I linked to an older post above where I describe it in a bit more detail if you're interested, and here is another post where blankey makes a brief appearance. This object has always been very special to me.

I found a picture on my phone of one of our cats with the blankey to provide a visual:

It used to be an actual blanket, but after a lifetime (literally) of putting my fingers into the pattern, and several washings that I protested to no avail, it is the mass of yarn you see before you. I'm trying to find the right words to describe my comfort-ritual with this blanket - in one of the linked posts I described it this way: "The pattern makes a bunch of holes that I put my fingers through over and over until my fingers are all full up with blanket and then I pull them all out and start again." To say "put my fingers through" doesn't quite capture it for me - because the sensation of having my fingers held in the holes of the blanket is the essence of my attachment to this comfort-object.

And I don't seem to need that anymore.

Thinking about my blanket brings up another experience I had recently while taking a bath. Though we have a truly sensational bathtub in our apartment, I rarely use it - so the other day I filled it up with Mr. Bubble and took a soak. It brought back a wave of body memories of taking baths as a child. I find that even simple things like taking a bath are "new" experiences for me as I become more open to my own feelings. I plugged my ears and went under the water, with just my face "outside," and was suddenly so aware of myself. I felt a feeling of connection with myself - I used to love doing the same thing as a child - being "just me" in the water, hearing my breathing, and feeling so very PRESENT in my body and my thoughts.

Taking a moment to recognize these bits of progress - the journey out of that frozen space of empty nothingness into the vibrant aliveness of healing and growing and FEELING is remarkably wonderful. I wish you all the same.

Have You Really Changed?

2011-12-15T10:49:00.000-06:00

I recently discovered an excellent resource called Abuse and Relationships, and I'd like to share a few items that I found useful. All material is the property of Michael Samsel MA, LMHC:

Abusing Truisms

Truisms are general statements about life that are hard to dispute. Most people use them to summarize or consolidate experience. The most general way to abuse truisms is to spread a demand out over a truism-filled monologue. The demand is harder to resist because of the 'true' atmosphere. To resist the demand seems like disputing the trueness of the truism. Also the truisms make the demand seem more reasonable.

There is also a group of truisms that is frequently employed just when accountability is asked for. Examples of those are "Everyone is human", "Everyone deserves a second chance", "Don't kick somebody when they're down", "Everyone makes mistakes". All these truisms apply to a setting of overall accountability. In the setting of power and control, they are just attempts to live irresponsibly.

Apologies

Apologies are verbal statements that recognize another person has experienced a small injury or inconvenience. For instance it is customary to apologize when bumping into someone on the sidewalk or when causing someone a small delay by being unprepared. Apologies are meant to convey that the behavior was either not intentional or not characteristic of the person giving offense.

In the hands of a primary aggressor, however, an apology becomes an attempt at a self-granted pardon. Power and abuse behaviors are both intentional and characteristic of primary aggressors, who have learned to exploit the impulse in survivors and others to feel they must 'accept an apology.' In the absence of reparation and willingness to cheerfully accept all the consequences of their behavior, apologies are insincere and manipulative. Pressure for the survivor to accept an apology is clearly more abuse.

Questions to Consider Before 'Going Back'

Patricia Evans provides the following for survivors who are unsure:

If you are separated from your loved one and wonder if there is change, please consider the following case. A couple were separated. One person (A) wondered if the other had changed, but realized the other (B) had not because of B's relentless pressure exerted on A to come back. Never once did B ask, "How do you feel? What do you want?" If you are facing this kind of pressure, it might be helpful to ask yourself the following questions. Do you hear,

What do you want?

What bothers you about being around me?

Do you like constant calls or emails from me?

How do you feel when you come to the house?

How do you feel after seeing me?

What do you envision as best for your future?

Are you interested in hearing my vision for us again, or do you feel usurped by my constantly telling you how you should be?

Are you interested in hearing me tell you what I want from you hundreds of times a week?

Do I sound selfish?

Have I shown an interest in your reality, experience, hopes, dreams?

Are you experiencing trauma from the things I said and did for years?

Do you shake when you see me?

Can you heal from this trauma?

Do you believe you could like a person who has been self-centered and abusive for a long time?

A Bunch of Hateful Losers

2011-12-15T08:56:00.009-06:00

I received the following comment on this post from someone who found my blog Googling estranged son letter:

It will be ok for your children to hate you too! For that is what you are modeling for them. Hating your parents is acceptable! You are all a bunch of hateful losers, Full of yourselves too!

If only it were that simple, Anonymous. Perhaps reducing estrangement to a simpleton's level, "my son hates me," makes your estrangement easier to tolerate (read: blame on someone else) - but the truth is likely much more complex, as it is in any situation where family ties disintegrate.

MulderFan jumped in with a great response:

mulderfan said...: Thanks for your attempt at affirmation Anonymous, but I don't hate my parents. If I did, being estranged would be so much easier!

This estranged landscape is a topsy-turvy world, carnival mirrors at every turn. With all the venomous hatred on display by the parent "featured" in that post, this person concludes that WE are the hateful losers? Brilliantly fucked.

p.s. Personally, I would never go on someone's blog and, after reading one post, call the entire community a bunch of hateful losers - never. That is just weak, dude. Get a life.

Disturbing Search Query

2011-12-13T09:55:00.001-06:00

The following search query came up in my keyword tracker, and it really disturbs me:

i am going to kill myself because of the estrangement from my adult daughters

I've seen some alarming stuff come through about stalking and attempted murder, but nothing so direct, so immediate. To GOOGLE this particular sentiment...I'm at a loss. Is the person searching for support? Have they made up their mind? What are they looking for?

For someone to see no future, to feel that life isn't worth living without his/her daughters - downright tragic. But that kind of need, what daughter could bear that burden? It is a need that inverts the natural order of life.

I hope this person calls a helpline, a friend, anything - nobody is going to save you, not your daughters, not Google, not all the tea in China - we all must save ourselves.

Validation Revisited

2011-12-09T15:13:00.004-06:00

In a much needed follow-up to his own blog post about validation (I wrote about the original post here), Steven Stosny posted the following today, which I'd like to share. What do you think about his self-rejoinder?

What I Should Have Said

Pain tells us to do something, but not what.

Published on December 9, 2011
by Steven Stosny in Anger in the Age of Entitlement

This post is a response to
Pain, Suffering, and Validation by Steven Stosny

This is a response to my own post, because the unfortunate way I worded some of the points has led to a regrettable misunderstanding of what I intended to communicate. I apologize for that and for the distress it has caused; the post should have been written and edited with more care.

My awkward and inadequate explanations led some people to believe that I was against validation and empathy. That I gave the latter impression is particularly disturbing. I started CompassionPower nearly 30 years ago as a program to train violent offenders to use self-compassion and compassion for others as an incompatible response to aggressive impulses. Over the years the program expanded to apply the same strategy to the precursors and predictors of violence, aggression, and abuse, namely entitlement and resentment.

I believe that my own research - and the more rigorous research of many others - has shown the necessity of compassion in family relationships. I have made the case many times in this blog and in all of my books and most of my articles that compassion is the most important emotion in relationships, much more important than love. Family relationships can thrive with low love, as long as compassion is high. But love without compassion is possessive, controlling, and dangerous. Compassion is the lifeblood of relationships.

The offending post was not about relationships, although it used relationships with no lifeblood, i.e., no compassion, as an example of suffering. It was the second of a two-part post about how we misunderstand the benefits of pain as a signal to heal, repair, and improve, and how, when that signal is ignored, pain generalizes over time into suffering.

Pain is an action-signal, a crucial part of the mammalian motivational system that keeps us safe and well. It tells us to do something, but not what. What to do - beyond fight or flight - must come from the prefrontal cortex, after it processes the signal of pain.

The pain/alarm system, like most components of biological systems, is somewhat trial and error. It gets you to do something, and if the pain gets better and doesn't come back, then you probably did the right thing. If the pain gets worse or ameliorates for a while but keeps coming back, then it's telling you to try something else.

What I should have done in the first of the two-part post (would have done if it were about relationships) was use an example of pain telling you to be more self-compassionate - care about your pain with a motivation to make it better - and one of the things that could make it better is to ask for compassion and validation from those you love. (If the relationship is truly healthy i.e., nurturing the growth and development of both parties, you shouldn't have to ask, but that is not the point here.)

Seeking validation is one way to heal, repair and improve, but only if you get it. (You are far more likely to get it if you give it, but with some people, no matter how much you give, they simply cannot give back, without therapeutic intervention.) '

Everyone deserves compassion and validation, and it's natural to seek them from others, especially loved ones. The point I wanted to make in the second of the two-part post is that once people convince themselves that they cannot heal or be whole unless a certain person validates them, they tragically underestimate their own value and their enormous power to heal, improve, learn, repair, and create value in their lives.

We want validation, we insist on it from those with whom we have close relationships because it can enrich our lives, but we do not need it to heal, improve, and repair. It is an unforgivable failure of compassion to suggest to people in pain that they cannot feel valuable, whole, and well, unless someone validates them, especially someone who has hurt them.

Finally, some readers felt that I was "blaming the victim," in the post. I deeply regret giving that impression. As a young child, I experienced repeated episodes of severe child abuse. Worse, while barely out of diapers, I had to witness my mother beaten on many occasions by my drunken father. That experience has driven me to do research and to work clinically with thousands of victims and abusers and to dedicate all my books on the subject to my mother. The last thing I want to do is blame someone for being hurt by loved ones. I was seeking, somewhat clumsily, to empower, to reassure those who suffer that they have the capacity to heal, repair, and create value in their lives, and to encourage them to recognize when their partners do not or cannot value and sympathize with them, that they must leave the burning building, because that is what their pain-alarm is telling them to do.

Reflections on Sincerity

2011-12-07T14:57:00.008-06:00

No matter how skilled an actor you are, in the end, sincerity can't be faked. You can fool someone for a time, maybe even fool yourself, but if there is a trace of pretense, a grain of deceit, one single atom of hypocrisy lurking under your facade of sincerity, eventually it will surface.

Two years ago, my ambivalence about my insincere, role-based relationship with NM intensified into crisis. I could not keep up the act any longer - my mask was crumbling. The risks of exposing my true self had finally reached (what I thought were) manageable levels. My fear of rejection, invalidation, and punishment had never been resolved, and I broke with my role and started speaking freely in an effort to find a new, adult connection with my mother. I thought she deserved a chance to know the real me, and that it would bring us closer. I took the leap in hopes that it was "all in my head" and she would welcome a new phase in our relationship.

It was the insincerity of my false-self that was the most unbearable element of my role as peacemaker, harmonizer, and fun-maker in my FOO. Like a depleted resource, I could not keep up the endless positivity. My role as friend and confidant for NM, mirroring back to her an image of the ideal mother, was impeding my growth into a whole person. These elements of me are real, yes, but they became exaggerated and clownishly disproportionate. I craved wholeness like a hungry child. As I began to face disowned parts of myself that I tried to kill so NM would love me, I felt like I was being pulled apart by the distance between these two selves. Something had to give.

I just wanted to be real. It seemed like such a small thing to ask for, such a natural area of growth, I was completely unprepared for what happened.

My desire to be understood was received by NM as an assault on her, to which she immediately came back swinging. Swinging at me, at DH, at anything and everything. I defended myself from her retaliations, which she took (of course) as an unprovoked assault, and we haven't made an inch of headway since then. That's where we're stuck, lodged halfway between birth and death. In giving birth to myself, she experienced it as a death. The false-upsi my FOO so adores is dead and gone, and they don't seem to truly want the real me, "warts and all" as the saying goes.

NM, EF, and BPB have gone though several strategic attempts to undo what happened, to bring false-upsi back to life. My anchor has been my commitment to sincerity & my refusal to betray myself. I won't fake it anymore, and I won't pretend their fakeness is real. I've seen the truth and it can't be undone. It can be worked through, but that takes willingness on all sides to own up to what happened. And that, my friends, is what is missing.

Where is the sincerity in a contingent blanket apology "if I've been hurt"? Where is the sincerity in a template letter of apology, stiff and impersonal like filling in the blanks on a form? Where is the sincerity in criticizing me for being unforgiving and nurturing my hurt, from the same mouth who professes to be so sorry for hurting me? The insincerity always surfaces. Look for the incongruence and you'll find the insincerity. Someone truly sorry for hurting you will not criticize you for being hurt.

In her latest text messages, she said this: "BPB started PT today and making progress - Upsi you are so dear to us. I am sorry to have hurt you in any way - and would do anything to make things better <3"

I want to believe in the sincerity of these words, but I can't. I know that intellectually she's "sorry to have hurt" me "in any way" - she regrets that the things she said hurt me because now we don't talk. But that regret remains abstracted, disconnected from the actual things she said and did. That's as close as she'll come to saying "I'm sorry for [insert specific thing], which was hurtful, and I want you to know I won't do it again."

I don't believe the pseudo-contrition on display in this text from her. If you think that's being too hard on her, you probably have a mother who can apologize with sincerity, able to offer the essential elements of an apology. I can feel okay about drawing a line in the sand and sticking to it, because that is what my integrity requires. To respond to this type of gesture as if it is the full-rigamarole would be a disservice to us both. Real is real. Real eventually surfaces, too, just like fake.

I know NM's desire to "make things better" is sincere insofar as she wants me in her life, but she has shown zero willingness to own up to her contributions to our estrangement. That's the boundary she won't cross. If we can make it better on her terms, within her comfort zone, then she's all for it - but that's a pretty goddamn limited set of terms.

Sincerity or bust.

Even

2011-12-05T15:58:00.007-06:00

all those years I was your girl
price ain't nice, cost ain't cheap

thought I'd be even
for all I paid
but your bills keep comin'
collectors keep knockin'

payin' in blood for
what shoulda come free

I don't gotta like it,
I don't gotta do it.

grabbin' when you shoulda been
lettin' go, tellin' when you oughta
been listenin', fightin' and flingin'
and wrastlin' for control when you
coulda been growin' n' changin'

I ain't fixin' what I didn't break,

ain't payin' what I don't owe.

To Close or Not to Close the Door

2011-11-30T08:51:00.002-06:00

I received the following comment and would like to put it out to you, Gentle Readers, for discussion:

Hello, I have a question that has been nagging at me. What is wrong with just shutting the door and walking away? A lot of people here leave the door open just a crack. Why? It's been my experience that only allows for more family air strikes. This is still new to me and maybe time is my answer, but I would really appreciate an answer from anyone who is further along their journey than I am and has asked this same question. Thank you.

I hear two different concerns expressed in this question: first, a moral concern with what is right and wrong; second, a practical concern with what will yield the most peaceful circumstances. I'll offer my thoughts, but I'm sure readers will have much to contribute.

As to the moral concern, I do not think there is a right or wrong when it comes to healing oneself and making choices that support that healing. There is nothing wrong with shutting the door completely. There will be a chorus of naysayers telling you otherwise, but that doesn't make it wrong per se. Depending on your moral orientation, your core values, and your particular situation, the answer may change, but from where I stand self-sacrifice is no more "right" than self-protection. I think many people leave the door open "just a crack" (great way of putting it, btw) not because they think it's wrong to close the door completely, but because it is so difficult to give up hope that things could be better.

As to the practical concern, I have found that keeping that little opening does indeed leave me open to "family air strikes" (another great image!). Practically speaking, I have had to distance myself in proportion to the increased aggressiveness of NM, BPB, and all the various flying monkeys who are more than willing to do their bidding. So from a pragmatic perspective, closing the door does allow you breathing space to heal.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

Real Feeling

2011-11-29T13:20:00.005-06:00

I dreamt the other night that NM was away on a trip. In the dream, I was both "me now" and "me then" simultaneously, as though I could exist at all the points of my life all at once (only in dreams as they say!). Someone in the dream was talking to her on the phone, and hung up to report that NM said she "wasn't even sure she wanted to come back." In my dream-feelings, I was utterly crushed that she wouldn't want to return to us, and immediately thought it was my fault. I cannot describe the depth of emotion in the dream, this immense collapsing feeling of being unworthy and abandoned. Oddly, though, I also knew that I had "told her the truth" about how I feel in our family, circa adult Upsi, but I could not shake that childhood feeling of being left, deserted, not good enough to return to. It was my real self, I thought in the dream, driving her away.

Then last night I had another dream about her, this time I arrived at a restaurant and saw that she was there. She was drunk and red-faced, and when she saw me she said loudly "Hi Upsi." I turned to leave and she said something like, "What, you won't even say hello to your own mother?" She was being loud and disruptive, and I said "you're being rude" and walked away.

To think about the first dream, I'd like to share a passage from an article by Alice Miller that appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1979:

"Take the feeling of being abandoned as an example - not that of the adult, who feels lonely and therefore takes tablets or drugs, goes to the cinema, visits friends or telephones 'unnecessarily' in order to bridge the gap somehow. No, I mean the original feelings in the small infant, who had none of these chances of distraction and whose communication, verbal and pre-verbal, did not reach the mother. This was not because the mother was bad, but because she herself was narcissistically deprived, dependent on a specific echo from the child, that was essential to her, and was herself a child in search of an available object. And however paradoxical this may seem, a child is at her disposal. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother did. A child can be so brought up that it becomes what she wants it to be. A child can be made to show respect, she can impose her own feelings on it, see herself mirrored in its love and admiration, and feel strong in its presence, but when it becomes too much she can abandon it to a stranger. The mother can feel herself the centre of attention, for her child's eyes follow her everywhere. When a woman had to suppress and repress all these needs with her own mother, they rise from the depth of her unconscious and seek gratification through her own child, however well-educated and well-intentioned she may be and however much she is aware of what a child needs. The child feels this clearly and very soon gives up the expression of its own distress. Later, when these feelings of being deserted being to emerge [in the child as an adult]...they are accompanied by such intensity of pain and despair that it is quite clear that these people could not have survived so much pain. That would only have been possible with an empathic, attentive environment, and this they lacked" (p. 49-50, italics in original).

I see the first dream as a gift from little upsi, a connection to real feeling that I am nurturing and taking seriously the way she (I) never experienced at the proper time. My own mother did not receive the love she needed as a child, and as a consequence was not able to give me the love I needed because she was still searching for her own.

I see the second dream as a gift from adult upsi, showing me my strength and clarity.

I am grateful for my dreams, they tell me stories I didn't know I knew.

(Note: I have a PDF of the Alice Miller article cited above, if you're interested, just send me an email and I'll gladly share! upsi.dancer [at] gmail.com )

Cult of Positivity

2011-11-21T16:28:00.005-06:00

I consider myself a pretty upbeat gal. I try to look on the bright-side, give people the benefit of the doubt, see the glass as half-full. I value resilience, realistic positivity, and compassion, to name a few of my favorites on the bright side. I also have my pet-peeves, my opinions about manipulators, reactions to injustice, my anger, my depression - life isn't all positive. I value accurate criticism, the exposure of wrongdoing, the acknowledgment of the negative things in life that indeed exist. This world has its dark sides. The Buddha got a handle on this in his first noble truth: life is suffering. Any attempt to gloss over this is, in my opinion, a disservice to us all.

Our ability to embrace the full spectrum of experience -- light and dark, positive and negative, good and bad -- is what makes us human. "Being real" is honest engagement with the facts - to the best of our ability. Authenticity is shedding lies and unnecessary defenses, discarding simplistic dogma, stepping away from one-size-fits-all worldviews and diving into the unknown.

Enter the Cult of Positivity. This pesky strain of dogma is relentless. I'm thinking about a quote I saw on FB from the group "Positive Thinking:"

“Apologizing does not always mean that you’re wrong and the other person is right. It just means that you value your relationship more than your ego.”

Reading this, I see first and foremost a fixation on not being "wrong." This quote is about being the "better person," not being truly sorry. It tips off my red flags. It begins with a sentiment rooted in justice and perverts it into a self-congratulating manipulation. Say you're sorry because you're sorry, not to pat yourself on the back for the small size of your ego. What a trip.

And this kind of stuff is EVERYWHERE. Here are a few more from that same group:

“I am me. No excuses. No Regrets…simply, inexplicably me”

“Let go of those who bring you down and surround yourself with those who bring out the best in you”

“Don’t worry about the people in your past; there’s a reason they didn’t make it to your future”

“Just be who you want to be, not what others want to see”

Each quote contains seeds of wisdom to be sure. Each also contain elements of "positive thinking" easily appropriated by the irresponsible & unrepentant. For example, I'm imagining my mother saying "I am me!" in triumph, dismissing my issues with her behavior using an affirmation meant for folks who have a hard time accepting themselves. She clearly has no problem accepting herself.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Positive thinking is not the be-all-end-all theory-of-everything. It can build up the downtrodden and shield the narcissistic. To rely on positive thinking alone to guide us through life's challenges and changes is as foolish as hiding under the covers. Our society puts too much stock in positivity, not quite enough in reality.

Another example: drawing distinctions between those who "bring us down" and those who are honest with us is not a science. Whether or not a person in your life is excessively, remorselessly negative is a matter of judgment. No pat phrase can account for each situation. Positive thinking cannot replace rational thinking, open-mindedness, or dialogue. A vague affirmation can be appropriated by any egotistical blowhard.

My point is that the positive and the negative BOTH have their place in human life. I think we all want to experience the minimum amount of suffering, to find a balance and eliminate unnecessary negativity in our lives, but attempting to eradicate negativity is just a form of denial. We depend on our good judgment to determine the value of positive and negative, and good judgment requires more than just an anti-negative stance.

Ambush

2011-11-20T13:32:00.003-06:00

SCW left the following this morning, I'm posting as an all-hands-on-deck support-fest because this kind of experience is rough as hell. Big props for remaining composed, above-the-fray, high-road-all-the-way SCW. Stand tall.

SCW said...

Upsi, this was the first place I thought to come with this as we were all just talking about it..

Tonight, I was ambushed.

I got a "sweet" call from a cousin I haven't seen or talked to in years and we chatted for quite some time. Several times she directed the conversation towards how much my NM and NGCsib "miss" me and how great it would be if we all got together. I didn't want to suspect anything because it could have been the case that she really didn't know the details of my estrangement from those two. I didn't "bite", I didn't offer any information about the estrangement. She broke my heart describing the two nephews that I lost, so I really didn't think that she had a clue, otherwise why would she do that, right?

Then she said "hold on" for a minute. I did. Then, who do you think began speaking to me on the line? I heard NGCsib saying, "Before you say anything, look, I'm tired of the charade."

NGCsib went on with that "Narc Forget Game" in a heavy-handed "come on now, enough's enough" attitude. By the sheer power of hearing her divine voice after two years I was supposed to come to my senses. No matter what I said it was immediately shot down. It's the same story most of us all know intimately- about not having a single thing we say acknowledged. "I haven't spoken to you in TWO YEARS and THIS is what you're saying?" I told her that with these same tactics of shutting me down it shows me that nothing has changed. She played the "sister" card and I asked her calmly what her definition of a sister is. She balked at that, of course. There wasn't a damn thing to work out; it was all me. "I would never NOT speak to YOU", and such. I was, as always, just expected to fall in line.

This was the first time that I had ever spoken to her with my own shit together. I was very calm. I showed willingness to work things out and what I heard in return did not surprise me. A narcissist is what it is. I gave her more time than she deserved with this same-ol'-same-ol' before I said that the conversation was over and hung up the phone (just as she was saying yes it is and was giving the phone back to our cousin).

This happened about 15 minutes ago. I do not feel sick. I am not riled-up. I only wish that I could turn off my voice mail feature entirely because I don't want any more.

I do worry, though, what possible backlash there might be in the near future as a result of her narcissistic injury tonight.

I just now received another call from my cousin's number. I did not answer. The voice mail was from my cousin asking me to call her back. Not going to happen.

So, there you have it, my own little "Portrait Of Stagnance". I feel a strange calm right now but I wonder what effect this will have on me in the next few days. Stress, no doubt. There's nothing left here to hold on to and I honestly wish this sick and twisted woman would just let me go.

November 20, 2011 3:36 AM

Peeking into Stranger's Brains

2011-11-16T11:27:00.003-06:00

Hot off the search engines for your sociological observation, a new batch of search terms that brought people to click my blog. The most fascinating part of this data is that it comes from REAL people looking for this content - I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried! You'll likely pick up on the flippant tone underlying my arrangement of these choice queries (wink).

how to win over estranged daughter?

play mind games, pull wool over eyes, scapegoat, play victim

how to win at your immature adult son’s games?

guilt and pressure from narcissistic mother

how to reconcile without apologizing?

rage at estranged child

should I want to reconcile?

if I don't stand my ground with my narcissist, I’ll lose all my self respect

should I tell estranged adult son I’m tired playing games?

narcissists reaction when scapegoat fights back

why estranged adult children distort the truth

"secretly mean" narcissistic mother glad when daughter hurt

my estrangement from my adult children is killing me

parental judgmental projection on you

estranged parents for no reason

estranged parents it is not always our fault

“alice miller” “increased awareness in adult children frightens many parents”

estranged defiant adult children
if someone demands you accept her apology

should you apologize if you've been provoked?

apologizing for things you don't need to apologize for

Portrait of Stagnance

2011-11-14T10:29:00.006-06:00

At the end of September, BPB and I had a little email exchange. In an effort to minimize drama, I didn't post it here. I'm posting now as a reference point for my position that Silence and Distance are the healthiest reactions to these kinds of exchanges, which continue on an endlessly stagnant loop. I've added links for context:

From: BPB
Date: Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 1:53 PM
Subject: A Fair Update

Hey Upsi

I was honestly going to write this email before I read your latest post, but I suppose you could say twas a lil motivator to send it now. By the way, I've been reading your blog very regularly for months (I'm living at home at the moment, so your stat counter is ticking my visits only.) I read it because you post a lot interesting material, and it's a constant reminder of how great a writer you are. I've enjoyed seeing the increase in the variety of content, as opposed to repetitive posts about NM issues. Honestly, I have really enjoyed having at least having a website to remind me that I have a blood sibling whom I used to hang with. But sadly, a blog is a poor substitute for a sister. Frankly, you requested that I read your blog if I want to "get to know you," and all I know is that you use the internet - you are still just as ethereal. I will continue to read it, but it's a faint reflection of the sis I love.

As for the crack...

In the last month, I had been trying to patch things up with the GF that you were introduced to. I had started going to therapy to try and sort out some realities. For example, why am I so dead set on trying to be with someone who's so difficult, emotionally immature, and stubborn? The therapist is a pretty straight shooter, so we got to business pretty quickly. Parents were on vacation, so she was staying with me. I came back from a session basically identifying some core issues: my attraction to 'taming the beast,' how mature I must feel when GF throws a tantrum and shuts down etc... After telling her about these lovely details, she was a bit upset and defensive despite confessing that she agreed they were true.

Things began to flare up and she went bogus on me, jumping to all sorts of conclusions that this would ensure that we couldn't be together. This totally enraged me and I tried to smack the pencil box on the countertop next to the stove in the kitchen. In my reckless inaccurate rage, I ran into the breadbox instead.

Instant shock and trauma. I thought I dislocated my elbow because hanging backwards like I'd just lost an arm wrestling match with Hulk Hogan, A fresh hell for little CHILDHOOD-NICKNAME boy. Bumpy ambulance ride with no clue how to brace myself with the EMT breaking through my veins trying to get an IV in fot 6-7 minutes. They splinted me up and sent me home the next day.

The surgery toughened me up to say the least. 72 hour inescapable pain marathon consisting of bloated swelling around all my new hardware and pissed off nerves. I redefined the max of my pain scale more times than I could count. I was sobbing, wailing, and almost seemingly possessed at some point because the acceptance of pain was not a matter of choice. It was kinda like hitting your funny bone really hard, but that sting lasting for 3 days, but coupled with a sensation that your arm was just dipped in a campfire.

To say the least, GF and I 'literally' broke up this time. This is the only pseudo-redeeming joke to make up for the embarrassing source of my fracture.

I didn't wanna mention anything to you because I don't feel confident engaging you at all. As for NM, I'm fucking pissed she couldn't help herself, and sure enough, she succeeded in giving you the wrong idea. I can assure you, she tried her hardest not to make it seem like we should all group hug because dads getting another stint, and I was harshly suggestive that she should keep the information strictly objective. Apparently she couldn't do that this time either, that's why I insisted that she stay silent, but after the unexpected intensity of the surgery, I agreed to let her send you a message. I DID NOT advise her to make any attempts at disguising this crisis as a means of reconnecting. Your post proves that she has failed at that again.

Dad and I are giving you all the space you want, and Mom is getting a lot better at leaving you alone, and I'm sorry you are still at a point where you think we're trying to bait you with crisis to reel you back into our little broken hearts. Take your time, we will be more ready than you think.

To boldly say what I've been deathly afraid to remind you of,

I love you so much, I miss you, and I hope you are loving everyone and everything around you.

xo
BPB

__________________________

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 3:50 PM, BPB wrote:

Subject: Between Us

I never imagined that we would ever have a division like this either. ever. I've given up on engaging with you because every single exchange we've had since the outset has ended in complete lack understanding.

The glass between us that you can only see through has many layers, so lett me reflect a few things off the sad surface.

You're still too scared to speak to any of us, but I really don't know why I'm included. One of the most surprising features of your choices is denial that communicating exclusively through written language it's cold, detached, and distant. I know you are a great writer, so naturally this is your home turf, but I can't believe you expect to get any 'closer' sending emails. It's still a matter of emotional safety for you, and I affirm that, but I'm not angry with you at all, and certainly not looking to call you so I can yell at you. If we said what up, we would probably be surprised at how easy it would be, but I can't guess what you think.

The thicker pain...

Straight up, you are entrenched in a very complicated plight - this aint news to you. But the scariest layer to see is the reality that your husband does not like your FOO, and it seems clear that you having a relationship with your own mother is a liability to your marriage. I don't care if my conjecture seems bold or uncaring - it must be really hard for you.

Now, let's be sure to not jump to conclusions and regress to thinking that I believe this WHOLE THING is based around DH, or that he 'forced you' into making your liberating decisions. I completely understand that your choices were made independently, but my point is that it must be hard to 'reconnect' when your closest love would love to see the glass thicken between all of us.

That's between you and yourself to clarify.

As for resolution...

It's about simple pattern recognition; I engage - we get nowhere. The last time we tried to move forward, it still seemed like the playground was under our feet when you told me that if I wanted to get to know you, I should read your blog.

Well I have, and again, with some enjoyment in doing so. But believing that your blog represents 'you' so much that it's an ostensible replacement for our natural human conversation, and that it would allow someone a brother to 'know' you is frankly really sad. It's a constant detached reiteration that you obviously have major core issues to deal with involving us, but you choose to submerge yourself within a community of the fellow abused to keep your show on the air.

Looks like there's other layers that only you can see.

Nothing I say seems to pass the intricate gauntlet of approval that seems to stand between us. Why?

Because you're still hiding, and if I've learned anything from your blog - you will come out of your cave when you are good and ready, and nobody is going to force you, coerce you, or even ask you to come out.

Such bullshit that you're complaining about getting what you're asked for.

I'm respecting the space between us, and squinting to find the faint reflections on the glass, but it seems like you're too busy washing the window on your blog. Keeping it nice and clean, removing any smudges that mar it's invisibility.

I'm my own team
BPB

________________________________

From: Upsi
Date: Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 1:07 PM
Subject: Re: Between Us

BPB,

I’m really sorry to hear how much pain you’ve been in with this arm injury, sounds just awful. The photos are insane, especially of the hardware. I do hope you start feeling better soon and that they are giving you pain meds to manage what must be mind numbing agony.

It means a lot to me that you read the blog, all your little digs aside. Yes, there is a repeating pattern here, which your second email made clear. You see me as hiding, too afraid to talk to you guys, choosing my marriage and my blog over my family, running away from dealing with core issues so I can keep my “show on the air.” Sounds familiar because I’ve heard it all before on a cyclical repeat. It’s not the truth and I’m not going to fight to convince you otherwise.

You wonder why you’re “included” in the group of Mom & Dad? Take a look at the last emails you wrote me, subject: Fuck you. Recall the destructive shit you say to me every time you “try to engage,” including your most recent email. Recall our last phone conversations. Recall your stunts, going to the hospital to get me to call mom, saying you never want to fucking talk to me again and you mean it. I don’t do this shit to you, BPB. I've never treated you like that and I never will. You’re living with the consequences of your own choices. You lost the privilege of talking on the phone with me when you abused the shit out of it. There's no gauntlet of unreasonable approval, just respect, which seems to be quite challenging for you.

As for complaining about getting what I asked for – I don’t see how you can support that claim but perhaps you’ll be more specific. I’ve yet to get what I asked for from Mom. You and Dad are living with the consequences of unequivocally supporting her every choice, so if I’m sad that it’s a package deal, forgive me, I never wanted it to be like this.

Upsi

_____________________________________

From: BPB

Date: September 25, 2011 2:54:48 PM CDT
Subject: Re: Between Us

Thanks for the the kindness - the break was very empowering. I've been a jerk in the past, but so has everyone else. I have completely lost sight of exactly what it is you are looking for from me.

The things that make me want to say "FUCK YOU" are calling me breaking my arm a 'stunt' to get you to call mom. How 'MTV' of you dude? It shows me how deeply lost you are in your cave of self-obsessed delusion, and how desperately you're holding on to your safe, obsolete memories about your family that you're still trying to use to strengthen your convictions. It's incredible that you make such audacious and convicted comments about your family that you know such little about anymore. Sounds like you blindly believe what's written in an estrangement book in the 'FOO Tactics' chapter. I don't claim to know anything about you anymore, because you have been away for so long I have no way of knowing anything real about your character, choices, or how you live your life. Your blog is like looking at the clothes in your closet.

You're right, it is a matter of respect. You lost mine when you let DH speak on your behalf and stab me in the heart like I've never felt before - so hurtful. I don't respect you when you read your journals from 03' and think you can equivocate the content to people you don't really know anymore - me. Sure dad and I still struggle with mom's force, but unlike you, I actually developed a mature relationship with her, and didn't hold in my true feelings for 15 years and then explode in 'truth liberation.' I've been challenging her my whole life, and I'm proud in my ability to do it verbally, directly, and eye to eye. You will probably naturally deny this, but I figured I would offer you some truth - you've gone from one prison to another. Perhaps their bars, not glass between us.

I'm beginning to sense a clear theme in a lot of the things I read from you. You are obsessed with the negative, and completely unable to forgive. Now I know you've posted some things on the meaning of forgiveness, so let me clarify my lexical intention - you either can't, or don't want to move forward in our relationship. If you are that hurt about something, and I don't know why, and what you want me to do about it, there could be a few possible reasons:

- I was told, and forgot (and need a reminder)
- I wasn't told, and expected to know what to do.
- I need to research the copious archive of emails to figure it out.
- your expecting me to know what to do
- you really are just hoarding the mistakes I've made to prolong the distance (how am I supposed to know if you really want to have a relationship again???)

I don't believe you want anything to do with your family anymore, because when you respond, it just feels like another wall being built. Now I could be misinterpreting your intentions, because perhaps your replies reflect an Upsi that is is hurt beyond my ability to understand (obviously, I haven't seen you or talked to you in like 2 years).

Your message has confirmed that I will be unable to be unglued from your parents as an enslaved follower in your eyes - fine. I love how you didn't even acknowledge some of the real meat of my last email - your plight. Selective as usual...

This has been in your court for a while now, so you can decide what we do from here. If you want to continue sparring, trying to futility update our positions, I'm willing to do so. If you want me to continue to just give you distance and wait for you to contact me if you ever feel like it - okay too. If you want to remind me of what you expect me to do in order to travel the road to forgiveness - cool. If you are honestly unable to move forward and forgive my choices made under extreme emotional.and hypomanic mental conditions - please figure that out, and state your conclusion honestly and directly.

I truly believe that you never wanted it to be like this, but your words only suggest that you want to keep it this way at all costs, or that you are more stubborn, angry, negative, and unforgiving than I've ever known.

BPB

___________________________________________________

Upsi to BPB

6:54 PM

for the record I was talking about the time you went to the hospital and asked me to tell mom bc you were too scared, I'm not a delusional fuck who would think you broke your arm to get me to talk to you, Jesus Christ BPB

Sent from my iPhone
__________________________________

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 7:39 PM, BPB wrote:

WOW... This is thick proof that you are really fucked and flailing right now. Did you all the sudden grant a guest writer authority to post on your blog who was the author of the post on september 22nd entitled "State of Emergency?"

The level of bullshit is alarming, and now im certainly feeling scared that you are unhealthy.

Denial is one of the most natural human propensities, but my patience for your display of this is shrinking rapidly.

Thanks for avoiding my inquiries, issues, and requests and responding with a (deliberate?) misguided, incendiary heap of bullshit.

How can I believe that youre not simply trying to light me on fire in order to make me say mean things for you to later publicly misrepresent me?

Sure, paint me with dark colors, but your last reply is honestly scary.

Address whatever issues or questions ive proposed, but a mirror might hell figure out whos only giving a shit about themself right now.

BPB
_______________________________

On Sep 25, 2011 9:19 PM, Upsi wrote:

"The things that make me want to say "FUCK YOU" are calling me breaking my arm a 'stunt' to get you to call mom. How 'MTV' of you dude? It shows me how deeply lost you are in your cave of self-obsessed delusion, and how desperately you're holding on to your safe, obsolete memories about your family that you're still trying to use to strengthen your convictions. It's incredible that you make such audacious and convicted comments about your family that you know such little about anymore. Sounds like you blindly believe what's written in an estrangement book in the 'FOO Tactics' chapter. I don't claim to know *anything* about you anymore, because you have been away for so long I have no way of knowing anything real about your character, choices, or how you live your life. Your blog is like looking at the clothes in your closet." (me quoting him)

The "stunts" I was referring to were in the past, I was not calling the arm break a stunt - I know it had nothing to do with me. That was all I was trying to clarify, and it is not inconsistent with my post about the texts mom sent. I was talking about the time you texted me in 2009 to say you were taking yourself to the hospital and to tell mom b/c you were too afraid, then in the morning you were fine and it was all clearly a stunt to get me to call mom.

Scared that I'm unhealthy? I've heard that one before, actually, I hear it every six months when one of you isn't getting the response from me that you want.

_______________________________

From:BPB

Date: September 25, 2011 8:47:39 PM CDT

To: Upsi
Subject: Re: Between Us

If I have learned anything about you in the past 2 years, it's that you build self serving convictions from distant information. What fires me up is that you pretend that one of your primary pursuit is truth. If you really wanted to know the truth of that complex situation, merely reading the texts won't lead you any closer to it. Unfortunately this applies to so many issues 'between us.'

I'd rather not babble back and forth, even thougn you have the ball. I don't expect you to reply on the subjects that dug into you (the issues that you probably won't dance with on your blog.) But I would appreciate a simple decision on the future (or lack of) our discourse. I know you don't respect me, but figure out what you want to do and promptly let me know.

BPB

_______________________

From BPB Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 4:48 PM

So funny that you choose to broadcast instead of replying. Im not putting any spears to your neck, I would just appreciate an opinion on what we're trying to accomplish at the moment. Your foo wanted to conceal this crisis from you at all costs (for obvious reasons) but again, nm asked my permission to tell you after the hell of the surgery. Now i'm back on the chopping block. Again, so surprising that you assume it's even possible to express 'love' through email. But time after time of challenging you, i've realized that i've also lost privledge.

'i love you' has been used as a powerful weapon in this situation, so i've given up on trying to express that.

Instead, i've dug up some issues you're clearly not willing to touch right now. And just like you think dad and I are enslaved by mom's tyranny, I think dh is fistpumping at our petty exchanges, and probably handing you the windex to shine the glass between us.

Conveniently invisible.

You dont want truth, resolution, or anything to do with me or your parents. If theres anything im forcing, its that you just fucking admit that so we can all move on (well, perhaps all of us).

Based on your last choice, ill just assume you'll cling to your canadian mother and the rest of your followers in hopes that you can continue to evade me.

Your evasion proves you have intellectually grown so much, but emotionally regressed back to that traumatized 13 year old ring leader.

Whos approval are you desperate for now? It's obviuosly not mine. If you think that i'm not being caring, or loving, your dead right. I guess when all I percieve from you is a clinical, cold and sterile author, I guess you could say it inspires me to be the same.

So now im supposed to know what you want, and what im supposed to do. Its like you're giving me an impossible test that ensures failure.

You don't even want me to lift my pencil, let alone try.

____________

My Reply, Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 6:18 PM

As your messages grow increasingly demanding and insulting, I am reminded of all the times this has happened before. What you call evasion is me deciding I'd rather not spend my time trying to refute all the baseless claims you make. I understand you crystal clear, there's no "lack of understanding." I get what you say and it isn't worth my time to argue with you.

What are "we" trying to accomplish right now? What is the future of our discourse? I don't know. I can live with that uncertainty. I am not going to join your escalating ultimatum-fest out of fear. You demand answers? You demand decisions? You want some definitive list of what to do to make things better?

sounds familiar.

_____________

From BPB, Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 6:59 PM

Haven't had a sister for two years, fine by me for two more. Sorry we cant get anywhere.

(applause from dh, and perhaps my twisted sister too)

Enjoy the comforting taste of your virtual thumb.

I really do miss you, but I dont miss the pungent taste of all your bullshit.

Its been a no win from the beginning, i'm sorry I let my opinion out of the bag again. Don't worry Upsi, all you have to to remain safe in your bubble is to let any of us try to communicate with you.

Works everytime.

Bpb

_________________

My Reply, Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 9:57 AM

Why is it that everytime we don't "get anywhere" (in your opinion) you have to try to destroy everything? Never want to talk again, set this bridge on fire, now it's you're fine with having no sister for another 2 years. It really sucks that you're all or nothing.

____________

From BPB, Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 1:49 PM

No bridge is ablaze here. I've just been extremely cautious saying things like, "i'll be there and ready when you are because I still and will always love you" because you have set all of us on fire for that (part of the no-win tactic).

After all the 3rd degree, I'm silently letting you choose to believe this or not. It is fair to interpret my words as 'all or nothing' because again, I've given up on reminding you that nothing really can stand between our love. Please undetstand that my "ultimatums" are in regard to our engagement and communication, not our relationship. In my previous email, did I ask you to decide if you still want a brother for the rest of your life? I easily admit that I spoke harshly and unfairly on the phone a couple years ago saying "i never want to speak to you again." It was wrong to say I was going to drown myself in alcohol. But I was just as enraged as DH was when he told your parents they would never see their grandchildren, and called your mother a cunt, congratulating her on ruining the family.

[Upsi Sidenote: DH never told my parents they would "never see their grandchildren" - that is a blantant falsehood. He did call her a cunt and congratulate her for ruining her family, and I don't blame him. It was part of the same conversation in which NM confessed she "sometimes wishes for a divorce" between us, insinuated that DH is gay, told us she fears that DH will murder me, and that's just the beginning, folks. So yeah, she was being a cunt as she recklessly destroyed her family. Pretty accurate if you ask me. Just a note for representational fairness...]

Your foo maybe down, but never for the count (despite the dear referee, waiting to yell KO).

My demands are about the level, frequency, and nature of our contact now that email cycles have flared up again. Again, as I ice my burns, I will boldly remind you,

I will never let our relationship, and deep sibling love burn to the ground.

So I will try to polite clarify what I want - how much contact, if any do you currently prefer with me?

Xo
BPB

________________________

My Reply, Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 2:26 PM

BPB,

You attribute so much malice and weakness to me. Constantly insulting my strength as a person, treating me as if I'm not strong enough to think and act for myself. Not mature enough to "face you" or to "face mom," not strong enough to "stand up to my husband" who is running me like a puppet in my "new prison." You think I'm deliberately keeping you from successfully connecting with me because my underlying agenda is to banish you forever from my life?

I'd like to have you in my life. Each time I let you in I get hurt and have to close you out again. I don't know how to change the way we interact. I wish we could have contact without it turning into this cycle every time. That we could find a way to be engaged without having to decide everything all at once, for all time.

What do I prefer? Calm. Productive. Constructive. Communication. Mutual respect, voluntary participation, fair play and freedom to choose. Separate but Connected. Not having to fuse with you and accept/agree with everything you say in order to be connected at all. Not having to distance myself from you to keep from being hurt.

I don't want to have to say "email this much, this often" - if there's something you want to tell me or ask me or whatever - I read my email. I'd be more apt to respond to calm, non-escalation-of-drama emails like your first one, than the kind in the last couple days. I was going to respond to your first email, I just wanted to think about it and take my time. In retrospect I shouldn't have done a post Saturday b/c it gave you the impression that it was my response, and I'll be more conscious of that in the future. If we can establish some kind of stability in writing I'll feel more trusting toward the phone - it's a process BPB, I need you to accept that if you want to find some kind of reconciliation.

I hope I've answered your question.

Upsi

_________________________

From BPB, Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 3:34 PM

ok sweet, I really like your tone here. thank you on many levels many things on this one. The thing we both have to try and realize, is that we are both mentally operating from memories of eachother's characters that have been developed beyond eachother's knowledge. You have changed so much since this whole thing exploded, and so have I (and actually, from an honest first-person perspective, so have mom and dad (mom more than dad)). I understand we both still have memories that keep some resentment alive, and that has unfortunately driven my communication more than my inspiration to know what your daily life is like, and how your tastes in all things have evolved.

I've noticed that when I try to kind of talk about everyday stuff, it's interpreted as a disrespectful dismissal of all the core problems that still exist in the FOO. So I haven't kept my communication casual, and have been very bold in stating all of my core feelings; trying to work through the past, and ascertain the current Upsi.

Please understand that it might take a few exchanges for me to figure out what you consider constructive and productive, because our archive displays a differing opinion in semantics.

I appreciate you understanding my disapproval of "threshold," I would have rather received that (in equal poetic form) as an email. Perhaps what would have peppered me day in this nascent fall season is another "you are beautiful" sticker.

reminds me of you.

BPB

Resonate

2011-11-13T10:02:00.001-06:00

This post is about the concept of resonating. In my annual review this fall, my supervisor said "it just resonates" as she described my attitude, my professionalism, my enthusiasm and positive energy. After three years working together, her comment meant a lot to me - like a gift. When someone shares their perception of your value and worth, accept what they're giving you, especially if you trust their perception.

That word, resonate, like an onomatopoeia evokes the image of being "filled with a deep, full reverberating sound" (thx to Google Dictionary). Singing in a stairwell, voices swelling. Cultivating rapport, sewing seeds of respect that flower into a landscape of blooming fondness. Connecting, that thrilling recognition of the other. I like the idea of resonating. Resonating inside like a container, resonating with others like tuning forks, values that resonate with groups and propel them to fight for change.

Lately I've been receiving messages from people simply thanking me for speaking - that my voice resonates with them. I am profoundly honored to speak and be heard - and I wish you all that experience. Like singing together in an echoing hallway, this dialogue I've found in the marvelous modern space-that-is-cyber fills me with joyful sound. Thank you - I will return again and again to contribute my voice. Together we resonate.

The Widespread Tolerance of Child Abuse

2011-11-12T13:25:00.004-06:00

Dr. McBride wrote a great piece about the sex abuse crimes coming to light at Penn State:

Published on Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com)

Why Boys Do Not Tell About Sexual Abuse

By Karyl McBride, Ph.D.
Created Nov 12 2011 - 9:49am

The dark cloud over Penn State revealing a sexual abuse scandal also holds a painful overcast shade for male victims of sexual abuse. The news of the cover-up and victimization of boys at this prestigious university has understandably caused a flurry of confusion, surprise, and concern for parents, educators, football fans, and all who care about children. Having worked in the sexual abuse treatment field for three decades, I've seen the difficulty for boys and men in reporting sexual abuse. Why is this so? Cover-ups, denial, and internalizing feelings seem to dominate rather than vulnerable exposure of abusive acts perpetrated on male victims. In general, people don't like to believe these things happen. It is difficult to understand that adults can be sexually attracted to children. For most healthy individuals, this concept does not compute.

But, let's take a look at why it is particularly difficult for males to report sexual abuse when it involves them. We know from studies done on sex offenders in prisons, that boys and girls are sexually abused at alarmingly high rates and most are shocked by the statistics. It is also well documented that sexual abuse of boys is underreported. Why?

It is difficult for any child to report sexual abuse because they feel guilty, they may have received threats from the offender, they fear they won't be believed, and they don't want to cause family problems. But for male victims, there are additional barriers to disclosure:

1. In our culture, boys are socialized not to be victims. "If I am a victim, can I then also be a man?" Big boys fight back and are not supposed to be victims or it somehow obliterates their identity of "manhood."

2. Guys are expected still, to tough things out and not ask for help. Fewer men, for example, seek therapeutic treatment and many are still adverse to this concept unless dragged to therapy by their families or spouses. Family therapist, Terry Real, wrote eloquently about this issue in his much-needed book about male depression titled: I Don't Want To Talk About It. Asking for help is still seen by many males in our culture as a sign of weakness.

3. It's likely an understatement that our society is still somewhat homophobic? It's getting better, but we have seen much in the current news about this issue still rearing its ugly head in military circles, same sex marriages, and legislative changes and discussions. So, for a young boy who is molested by a male offender, the issue of sexual identity comes into play. We see young males in therapy asking the question frequently: "If I am abused by a male and I am also male, does that mean I am gay?" Little children, ages 8-10, ask this question frequently in therapy, and teen male victims often just choose to suffer in silence because of this fear. "Will my peer group label me as gay if I tell?"

4. When young boys are touched in the genital area, they can have an erection. It is visible to them, different from female victims. The touching can feel good to both boys and girls and then cause great confusion. "Did I want this?" "If it feels good, is it my fault?" "If there is pleasure, I must be the one in the wrong."

5. When young boys are sexually abused by female offenders, there is another interesting mind assault. If a young male is getting attention sexually from an older woman, he is often seen as lucky. Boys can be experimental with sex and that is often regarded, as "boys will be boys." And if the offender is the child's mother, you can only imagine the difficulty in reporting, and the devastation for the child.

6. Often boys report that they don't view the sexual acts perpetrated on them as that abusive. They minimize or deny the impact to avoid feelings of helplessness or confusion.

So taking these reporting issues for boys and putting them in the context of the male world of football, one can see the great impediment to reporting something as vulnerable as being sexually abused. If I'm a big tough guy...this did not happen to me. It is more typical for young male victims to use coping strategies like becoming aggressive to overcome the feelings of helplessness, or trying to numb the feelings with drugs or alcohol. In many cases they internalize the trauma and become depressed.

In a college football environment, the players are still young, developing men. The coaches, as well as other instructors, play an almost parental-like role with these young people. The power differential is obvious and the effects devastating when the power of the leader is misused in a secretive, abusive, and flawed manner that actually encourages a wall of silence for compliance that results in reward.

The bottom line is that it is up to adults to protect young people and the need for further education for parents and educators in this arena remains a constant call for clarity and direction. While much has been done in prevention and education regarding child sexual abuse, unfortunately there is more to do. We can start with creating emotionally safe environments for males to disclose sexual abuse and let it be known to boys that this can happen to them too. Boys should be taught more realistic roles to emulate other than the classic tough guy.

And finally, let's not forget that sex offenders are the prime narcissists in this culture. Their lack of empathy is palpable. They are most concerned with getting their own sexual and power needs met and therefore the impact on the victim... is not on their radar.

(Some resources taken from Virginia Child Protection Newsletter, Volume 29, fall 1989)

Additional Resources:

Book: Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers http://www.amazon.com/Will-Ever-Good-Enough-Narcissistic/dp/14391...

Audiobook: Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers http://www.willieverbegoodenough.com/buy-the-book.php

Website: www.nevergoodenough.com and www.karylmcbridephd.com

Survey: Is This My Mom? Use this to assess if your parent has narcissistic traits. It is applicable for men as well.
http://www.willieverbegoodenough.com/survey.php

Research: Interview You? http://www.willieverbegoodenough.com/for-men.php

FB Parties for Adult Children of Narcissists: http://www.facebook.com/DrKarylMcBride

Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing The Daughters Of Narcissistic Mothers

Workshop 2012 Conference dates to be announced soon!

For Information: www.nevergoodenough.com

Source URL: http://www.psychologytoday.com/node/79429

Links:
[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/experts/karyl-mcbride-phd
[2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-legacy-distorted-love
[3] http://www.psychologytoday.com/taxonomy/term/159861
[4] http://www.psychologytoday.com/taxonomy/term/1066
[5] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/abuse-scandal-0
[6] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/big-boys-3
[7] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/boys-and-girls
[8] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/child-abuse
[9] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/child-sexual-abuse
[10] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/dark-cloud
[11] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/denial
[12] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/disclosure
[13] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/family-therapist
[14] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/football-fans-2
[15] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/football-players
[16] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/homophobia
[17] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/homophobic
[18] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/male-depression
[19] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/male-identity
[20] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/manhood
[21] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/narcissism
[22] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/overcast-0
[23] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/penn-state
[24] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/perpetrators
[25] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/prestigious-university
[26] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/prisons
[27] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/sex-offenders
[28] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/sexual-abuse
[29] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/sexual-abuse-treatment
[30] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/therapeutic-treatment
[31] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/therapy
[32] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/three-decades
[33] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/trauma
[34] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/ups
[35] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/victims
[36] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/victims-sexual-abuse

Advice for a Concerned Step-parent

2011-11-11T11:15:00.001-06:00

I received the following inquiry (which I've edited slightly to protect our anonymous reader) - if you have any advice or experience, please share!

"Perhaps some of your readers could help me. My step daughter has an ignoring NPD mother. While trying to figure out her particular problem searching the web I concluded she has NPD. Just wondering how I help my stepdaughter from being harmed. She has 50 percent custody...I am intelligent enough to know how to properly deal with the problems inherent in divorce and step families, but totally unprepared for the insanity this woman has brought into our lives. My fiancee has gone NC with her, which has really helped a lot.

It took a while for me to realize that the issues she fabricated and took us to court for (not bathing them not brushing their teeth, etc), were projections of her own behavior. One example was this lavish birthday party she planned for my SD, blogged about it on her blog matching everything, perfect party....yet didn't put sunscreen on her super white Swiss children....burned beyond belief.

I guess I'm just looking for insight on how to combat something I have no control over, like the way she ignores my SD when she is in her care. Perhaps some examples from other adult women who had ignoring NPD mothers and step mothers? SD has low self esteem, not a very good relationship with her mother, feels ignored and unloved. She has a great father, he is affectionate and loving with his kids.

All advice is welcome. In the past I have let the NPD mother know I know what she is, and she has a fierce hatred for me, of course."

Judas

2011-11-10T11:17:00.010-06:00

November is a tough month - lots of emotional triggers. DH's mom killed herself in November. His brother tried to hang himself in our apartment in November. My Truth Campaign really got cooking in November. My brother's betrayal hit in November. I could go on...

Unlike my parents, BPB actually hung out with DH & I and (we thought) got to know who we are as people. I thought we had a bond of loyalty, a bond of understanding - hell, I thought we had a bond PERIOD.

I've been thinking about that first sting of his betrayal - it has not yet worn off. As soon as I started trying to be real and talk honestly with my mom about our relationship, BPB cut and run.

Recap for those just joining me: after visiting us for Thanksgiving in 2009, BPB sent me a scathing, shaming, blaming, and most importantly, abandoning email.  I was trying to keep BPB out of the situation, and DH ended up sending a response to his email. I remember thanking DH with tears in my eyes for defending me, for standing up for me - never once having experienced fierce loyalty like his in a time of family crisis. With hindsight, I see that I took the pussy way out, but I stand by everything DH said to my brother. I should have said it myself, if only I understood at the time the way my family would take aim at my husband for defending me. Live and learn, as they say.

I sensed BPB's thinly veiled hostility. He had the whole weekend to say what was on his mind, and didn't. But he shot off that email RIGHT when he got home. To use the parlance of my FOO: he didn't have the courage to "say it to my face" -- which is funny actually, considering that NM and BPB both vehemently denounce the power of email to communicate. My goal that weekend was to give him the opportunity NOT to take sides. He didn't take me up on the offer. Our visit was awkward, tense - the kind of visit where there's all this unspoken subtext and only looking back does it begin to make sense.

Little did I know at the time that BPB was collecting evidence to build some kind of case. Asking loaded questions neither DH nor I perceived to be so loaded. That was the last time I spent with my brother, and it was the last time I trusted him. I wasn't putting on a show, I was being myself, and he seized the opportunity to report back to my parents. He took a shitty situation and made it a THOUSAND times worse.

Had I known he was on a recon mission, I'd have been more careful knowing everything I said and did would be portrayed to my parents by BPB as unhealthy and out-of-control. For all the out-of-control, unhealthy, and self-destructive shit my brother has done that I kept between us, his actions after that weekend hit me like the proverbial FULL JUDAS treatment.

And what really gets me, all details aside, is that my brother doesn't seem to think he betrayed me in the least. After years of proclaiming deep love for DH, he turned on him so fast it made our heads spin. He has somehow deluded himself into thinking he played no part in the destruction of our relationship. He doesn't seem to care. It's all, well now I want to re-connect so let's forget all that. BPB told me he feels sorry for me because clearly having a relationship with my mother is a "liability to my marriage" - another twisted version of the same bullshit my parents have been peddling since the get-go. More like speaking my mind and being a separate human being from her is a liability to our relationship. Try as they might to make this something about DH, the simple elegant truth is that it's about me. My feelings. My experience. My perceptions. DH just wants me to be happy.

"What happened" matters.  My brother attacked DH, and when DH reacted, BPB turned the tables and made it all about DH, conveniently downplaying that we were reacting to his betrayal. I suppose he expected us to thank him?

My brother casually calls me stubborn, angry, negative, and unforgiving. He chalks his behavior up to mania and calls it a day, as though his illness is some blanket excuse for being a complete and total asshole. I'm not speculating here, folks, these are his sentiments from our most recent go-round. I don't know how this kind of breach between siblings can be mended, but it sure as hell doesn't heal stuffed under a rug.

Come to Your Senses

2011-11-08T16:31:00.000-06:00

The phrase "come to your senses" popped out to me the other day, I think I overheard someone say, "when is she going to come to her senses?" The saying seems to imply an absense of "common sense" - a lack of clarity, a state of confusion or unwise action. Perhaps I'm hyper-attuned to these little subjectivities, fair enough, but really whose "senses" are we to come to? It implies this universal state of sensibility....and we all know that doesn't exist (we, the narco-survivors, the gaslit faces, those struggling to find sanity and peace amidst the endless revisions of history and dodgings-of-accountability).

It strikes me as bizarre that I have thought "when will they come to their senses?" about my family, all the while I can also hear them saying the same about me. It's that old mirror game. We're both waiting for the other to come to their senses - or perhaps it really means "come to MY senses" and agree with me!

I'm bothered by the power of sayings like this to define our realities. Don't allow others to define your situations for you with little pat sayings like, "come to your senses already!" And be armed with your retort: I have come to my senses, thank you.

Grieving, or Lack Thereof

2011-11-03T12:11:00.003-05:00

I received the following questions from a reader, and would like to post them here as the beginning of an open ended discussion. Thanks to the anonymous reader for raising these, I have only one bit of detail about the last question, which I've included. Thanks in advance as well to anyone who can shed light on these difficult questions.

Are there adult estranged children who did not reconcile with their parents before their deaths?

How did the children respond to the death?

Did any adult children not go to funerals?

Are there other people in the world who have not spoken to blood relatives for more than 10 years?

Are racial and ethic minorities less likely to cut of parents?

I received a memorable comment on this post which addresses the last question:

"I am so glad I have found information on a mother who is narcissistic! I am 52 and I am an over achiever. I have been blessed to be married to my childhood sweetheart and we have three sons. I graduated from high school at 16 to leave the grips of my "secretly mean" narcissistic mother. I am an African American and our culture sheds a great value on the love of a mother. The mother is revered and it is a damnation / sin to feel anything but pure unadulterated love for your mother. So it was especially difficult to be under the rule of a mother who the entire community felt was a model mother, school teacher and church person. Especially since I live in a small town where everyone knows you. My mother is not only mean she can be vicious. She targeted my sister and I too cruelly beyond imagination including beatings. However her cruelty was far worse in the verbal form. I was called sluts and whores before I reached the age of seven and so was my sister. She treated my father (who was a humble man) like a dog. Constantly telling him he was less than a man. And totally controlling every dime he received from his veterans benefits. She did not allow us the ability to make any decisions even as simple as what type of shoes we wanted. Her daily declaration was "you are not shit and you never will be shit". I can never remember getting a kind word from her as a child. My sister was the easiest target due to her always seeking acceptance of my mother’s love. Unfortunately my sister's life was so affected by her lack of love that she made bad choices and married two men who ultimately physically and mentally abused her. She is now diagnosed as Bi Polar. She has tried to commit suicide on over three occasions. And has been hospitalized over 20 times however she still chooses to live with my mother and continue to seek her love. My mother's control and meanness included so many incidents of lack of love that they are too many to list. However, if you are on this post I am sure you understand my life.

I have had a lifetime of working on "what is wrong with my childhood". I had years of my husband and friend saying your mother loves you she is just set in her ways. No one would address the fact that no "your mother is incapable of loving you" She has a severe Personality Disorder. Your information has helped me sooo much. I always knew she did not love me but I always tried to figure out why? I knew she was not the typical crazy because she could fool so many people into believing she was a good person. She is now 82 and her health is failing. I am having a hard time accepting the fact that I must (it's my religious conviction) be prepared to take care of a woman who never has and never will love me. I also fear the day that she dies (if she passes before me). I don’t want to drop ONE TEAR for a person who never gave me one day of love. However I am conflicted because deep down I still love her (she is my mother).

I am mentally trying to prepare myself to take care of a person who I feel not only doesn’t love me but who most likely hates me. I hope to find solace and comfort and your information on this subject is very helpful. Thank you for addressing the "silent sin" of being a child whose mother does not love me."

Franz Kafka's Letter to his Father

2011-10-28T10:53:00.001-05:00

I'm currently reading Franz Kafka's Letter to His Father - partly because Alice Miller has referenced it several times in her work, and partly because of the intriguing history of the letter itself. As our good friend Wiki notes, "Kafka's relationship with his father was severely troubled as explained in the Letter to His Father in which he complained of being profoundly affected by his father's authoritarian and demanding character." Franz composed the following letter to his father and gave it to his mother to deliver. His mother, we learn, never gave it to his father. In the biography linked here at word "mother," the letter is described as a "confessional, lacerating letter...[that] incidentally, his father never saw...Franz gave it to his mother so that she would give to him, but after looking at it she thought better of it."

It is quite lengthy, but I'm including it here for anyone interested. One wonders what would have come from his father actually reading it...

Franz Kafka's Letter to his Father

Dearest Father,

You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning, to you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what "children's gratitude" is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with crackpot ideas. I have never talked to you frankly; I have never come to you when you were in the synagogue, never visited you at Franzensbad, nor indeed ever shown any family feeling; I have never taken any interest in the business or your other concerns; I saddled you with the factory and walked off; I encouraged Ottla in her obstinacy, and never lifted a finger for you (never even got you a theater ticket), while I do everything for my friends. If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don't charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangements and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you aren't in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me.

This, your usual way of representing it, I regard as accurate only in so far as I too believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally entirely blameless. If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible is—not, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for that—but still, a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches.

Oddly enough you have some sort of notion of what I mean. For instance, a short time ago you said to me: "I have always been fond of you, even though outwardly I didn't act toward you as other fathers generally do, and this precisely because I can't pretend as other people can." Now, Father, on the whole I have never doubted your goodness toward me, but this remark I consider wrong. You can't pretend, that is true, but merely for that reason to maintain that other fathers pretend is either mere opinionated nests, and as such beyond discussion, or on the other hand—and this in my view is what it really is—a veiled expression of the fact that something is wrong in our relationship and that you have played your part in causing it to be so, but without its being your fault. If you really mean that, then we are in agreement.

I'm not going to say, of course, that I have become what I am only as a result of your influence. That would be very much exaggerated (and I am indeed inclined to this exaggeration). It is indeed quite possible that even if I had grown up entirely free from your influence I still could not have become a person after your own heart. I should probably have still become a weakly, timid, hesitant, restless person, neither Robert Kafka nor Karl Hermann, but yet quite different from what I really am, and we might have got on with each other excellently. I should have been happy to have you as a friend, as a boss, an uncle, a grandfather, even (though rather more hesitantly) as a father-in-law. Only as a father you have been too strong for me, particularly since my brothers died when they were small and my sisters came along only much later, so that I alone had to bear the brunt of it—and for that I was much too weak.

Compare the Two of us: I, to put it in a very much abbreviated form, a Löwy with a certain Kafka component, which, however, is not set in motion by the Kafka will to life, business, and conquest, but by a Löwyish spur that impels more secretly, more diffidently, and in another direction, and which often fails to work entirely. You, on the other hand, a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale, of course also with all the defects and weaknesses that go with these advantages and into which your temperament and sometimes your hot temper drive you. You are perhaps not wholly a Kafka in your general outlook, in so far as I can compare you with Uncle Philipp, Ludwig, and Heinrich. That is odd, and here I don't see quite clear either. After all, they were all more cheerful, fresher, more informal, more easygoing, less severe than you. (In this, by the way, I have inherited a great deal from you and taken much too good care of my inheritance, without, admittedly, having the necessary counterweights in my own nature, as you have.) Yet you too, on the other hand, have in this respect gone through various phases. You were perhaps more cheerful before you were disappointed by your children, especially by me, and were depressed at home (when other people came in, you were quite different); perhaps you have become more cheerful again since then, now that your grandchildren and your son-in-law again give you something of that warmth which your children, except perhaps Valli, could not give you. In any case, we were so different and in our difference so dangerous to each other that if anyone had tried to calculate in advance how I, the slowly developing child, and you, the full-grown man, would behave toward one another, he could have assumed that you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me. Well, that did not happen. Nothing alive can be calculated. But perhaps something worse happened. And in saying this I would all the time beg of you not to forget that I never, and not even for a single moment believe any guilt to be on your side. The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having. But you should stop considering it some particular malice on my part that I succumbed to that effect.

I was a timid child. For all that, I am sure I was also obstinate, as children are. I am sure that Mother spoiled me too, but I cannot believe I was particularly difficult to manage; I cannot believe that a kindly word, a quiet taking by the hand, a friendly look, could not have got me to do anything that was wanted of me. Now you are, after all, basically a charitable and kindhearted person (what follows will not be in contradiction to this, I am speaking only of the impression you made on the child), but not every child has the endurance and fearlessness to go on searching until it comes to the kindliness that lies beneath the surface. You can treat a child only in the way you yourself are constituted, with vigor, noise, and hot temper, and in this case such behavior seemed to you to be also most appropriate because you wanted to bring me up to be a strong, brave boy.

Your educational methods in the very early years I can't, of course, directly describe today, but I can more or less imagine them by drawing conclusions from the later years and from your treatment of Felix. What must be considered as heightening the effect is that you were then younger and hence more energetic, wilder, more primitive, and still more reckless than you are today and that you were, besides, completely tied to the business, scarcely able to be with me even once a day, and therefore made all the more profound impression on me, one that never really leveled out to the flatness of habit.

There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a direct memory. You may remember it, too. One night I kept on whimpering for water, not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche,* and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door. I am not going to say that this was wrong—perhaps there was really no other way of getting peace and quiet that night—but I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and then the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were Two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.

*Pavlatche is the Czech word for the long balcony in the inner courtyard of old houses in Prague. (Ed.)

That was only a small beginning, but this feeling of being nothing that often dominates me (a feeling that is in another respect, admittedly, also a noble and fruitful one) comes largely from your influence. What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it for me, though of course with the good intention of making me take another road. But I was not fit for that. You encouraged me, for instance, when I saluted and marched smartly, but I was no future soldier, or you encouraged me when I was able to eat heartily or even drink beer with my meals, or when I was able to repeat songs, singing what I had not understood, or prattle to you using your own favorite expressions, imitating you, but nothing of this had anything to do with my future. And it is characteristic that even today you really only encourage me in anything when you yourself are involved in it, when what is at stake is your own sense of self-importance, which I damage (for instance by my intended marriage) or which is damaged in me (for instance when Pepa is abusive to me). Then I receive encouragement, I am reminded of my worth, the matches I would be entitled to make are pointed out to me, and Pepa is condemned utterly. But apart from the fact that at my age I am already nearly unsusceptible to encouragement, what help could it be to me anyway, if it only comes when it isn't primarily a matter of myself at all?

At that time, and at that time in every way, I would have needed encouragement. I was, after all, weighed down by your mere physical presence. I remember, for instance, how we often undressed in the same bathing hut. There was I, skinny, weakly, slight; you strong, tall, broad. Even inside the hut I felt a miserable specimen, and what's more, not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things. But then when we stepped out of the bathing hut before the people, you holding me by my hand, a little skeleton, unsteady, barefoot on the boards, frightened of the water, incapable of copying your swimming strokes, which you, with the best of intentions, but actually to my profound humiliation, kept on demonstrating, then I was frantic with desperation and at such moments all my bad experiences in all areas, fitted magnificently together. I felt best when you sometimes undressed first and I was able to stay behind in the hut alone and put off the disgrace of showing myself in public until at last you came to see what I was doing and drove me out of the hut. I was grateful to you for not seeming to notice my anguish, and besides, I was proud of my father's body. By the way, this difference between us remains much the same to this very day.

In keeping, furthermore, was your intellectual domination. You had worked your way so far up by your own energies alone, and as a result you had unbounded confidence in your opinion. That was not yet so dazzling for me, a child as later for the boy growing up. From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right. It did sometimes happen that you had no opinions whatsoever about a matter and as a result every conceivable opinion with respect to the matter was necessarily wrong, without exception. You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left except yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason. At least so it seemed to me.

Now, when I was the subject you were actually astonishingly often right; which in conversation was not surprising, for there was hardly ever any conversation between us, but also in reality. Yet this was nothing particularly incomprehensible, either; in all my thinking I was, after all, under the heavy pressure of your personality, even in that part of it—and particularly in that—which was not in accord with yours. All these thoughts, seemingly independent of you, were from the beginning burdened with your belittling judgments; it was almost impossible to endure this and still work out a thought with any measure of completeness and permanence. I am not here speaking of any sublime thoughts, but of every little childhood enterprise. It was only necessary to be happy about something or other, to be filled with the thought of it, to come home and speak of it, and the answer was an ironic sigh, a shaking of the head, a tapping on the table with a finger: "Is that all you're so worked up about?" or "Such worries I'd like to have!" or "The things some people have time to think about!" or "Where is that going to get you?" or "What a song and dance about nothing!" Of course, you couldn't be expected to be enthusiastic about every childish triviality when you were in a state of vexation and worry. But that was not the point. Rather, by virtue of your antagonistic nature, you could not help but always and inevitably cause the child such disappointments; and further, this antagonism, accumulating material, was constantly intensified; eventually the pattern expressed itself even if, for once, you were of the same opinion as I; finally, these disappointments of the child were not the ordinary disappointments of life but, since they involved you, the all-important personage, they struck to the very core. Courage, resolution, confidence, delight in this and that, could not last when you were against it or even if your opposition was merely to be assumed; and it was to be assumed in almost everything I did.

This applied to people as well as to thoughts. It was enough that I should take a little interest in a person—which in any case did not happen often, as a result of my nature—for you, without any consideration for my feelings or respect for my judgment, to move in with abuse, defamation, and denigration. Innocent, childlike people, such as, for instance, the Yiddish actor Löwy, had to pay for that. Without knowing him you compared him, in some dreadful way that I have now forgotten, to vermin and, as was so often the case with people I was fond of, you were automatically ready with the proverb of the dog and its fleas. Here I particularly recall the actor because at that time I made a note of your pronouncements about him, with the comment: "This is how my father speaks of my friend (whom he does not even know), simply because he is my friend. I shall always be able to bring this up against him whenever he reproaches me with the lack of a child's affection and gratitude." What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power. I too, I am sure, often hurt you with what I said, but then I always knew, and it pained me, but I could not control myself, could not keep the words back, I was sorry even while I was saying them. But you struck out with your words without much ado, you weren't sorry for anyone, either during or afterward, one was utterly defenseless against you.

But your whole method of upbringing was like that. You have, I think, a gift for bringing up children; you could, I am sure, have been of help to a human being of your own kind with your methods; such a person would have seen the reasonableness of what you told him, would not have troubled about anything else, and would quietly have done things the way he was told. But for me as a child everything you called out to me was positively a heavenly commandment, I never forgot it, it remained for me the most important means of forming a judgment of the world, above all of forming a judgment of you yourself, and there you failed entirely. Since as a child I was with you chiefly during meals, your teaching was to a large extent the teaching of proper behavior at table. What was brought to the table had to be eaten, the quality of the food was not to be discussed—but you yourself often found the food inedible, called it "this swill," said "that cow" (the cook) had ruined it. Because in accordance with your strong appetite and your particular predilection you ate everything fast, hot, and in big mouthfuls, the child had to hurry; there was a somber silence at table, interrupted by admonitions: "Eat first, talk afterward," or "faster, faster, faster," or "There you are, you see, I finished ages ago." Bones mustn't be cracked with the teeth, but you could. Vinegar must not be sipped noisily, but you could. The main thing was that the bread should be cut straight. But it didn't matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy. Care had to be taken that no scraps fell on the floor. In the end it was under your chair that there were the most scraps. At table one wasn't allowed to do anything but eat, but you cleaned and cut your fingernails, sharpened pencils, cleaned your ears with a toothpick. Please, Father, understand me correctly: in themselves these would have been utterly insignificant details, they only became depressing for me because you, so tremendously the authoritative man, did not keep the commandments you imposed on me. Hence the world was for me divided into three parts: one in which I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me and which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with; then a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of orders and with the annoyance about their not being obeyed; and finally a third world where everybody else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey. I was continually in disgrace; either I obeyed your orders, and that was a disgrace, for they applied, after all, only to me; or I was defiant, and that was a disgrace too, for how could I presume to defy you; or I could not obey because I did not, for instance, have your strength, your appetite, your skill, although you expected it of me as a matter of course; this was the greatest disgrace of all. This was not the course of the child's reflections, but of his feelings.

My situation at that time becomes clearer, perhaps, if I compare it with that of Felix. You do, of course, treat him in a similar way, even indeed employing a particularly terrible method against him in his upbringing: whenever at meals he does anything that is in your opinion unclean, you are not content to say to him, as you used to say to me: "You are a pig," but add: "a real Hermann" or "just like your father." Now this may perhaps—one can't say more than "perhaps"—not really harm Felix in any essential way, because you are only a grandfather to him, an especially important one, of course, but still not everything as you were for me; and besides, Felix is of a quiet, even at this stage to a certain extent manly character, one who may perhaps be disconcerted by a great voice thundering at him, but not permanently conditioned by it. But above all he is, of course, only comparatively seldom with you, and besides, he is also under other influences; you are for him a rather endearing curiosity from which he can pick and choose whatever he likes. For me you were nothing in the least like a curiosity, I couldn't pick and choose, I had to take everything.

And this without being able to produce any arguments against any of it, for it is fundamentally impossible for you to talk calmly about a subject you don't approve of or even one that was not suggested by you; your imperious temperament does not permit it. In recent years you have been explaining this as due to your nervous heart condition. I don't know that you were ever essentially different. Rather, the nervous heart condition is a means by which you exert your domination more strongly, since the thought of it necessarily chokes off the least opposition from others. This is, of course, not a reproach, only a statement of fact. As in Ottla's case, when you say: "You simply can't talk to her at all, she flies straight in your face," but in reality she does not begin by flying out at all. You mistake the person for the thing. The thing under discussion is what flies in your face and you immediately made up your mind about it without listening to the person; whatever is brought forward afterward merely serves to irritate you further, never to convince you. Then all one gets from you is: "Do whatever you like. So far as I'm concerned you have a free hand. You're of age, I've no advice to give you," and all this with that frightful, hoarse undertone of anger and utter condemnation that makes me tremble less today than in my childhood only because the child's exclusive sense of guilt has been partly replaced by insight into our helplessness, yours and mine.

The impossibility of getting on calmly together had one more result, actually a very natural one: I lost the capacity to talk. I daresay I would not have become a very eloquent person in any case, but I would, after all, have acquired the usual fluency of human language. But at a very early stage you forbade me to speak. Your threat, "Not a word of contradiction!" and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since. What I got from you—and you are, whenever it is a matter of your own affairs, an excellent talker—was a hesitant, stammering mode of speech, and even that was still too much for you, and finally I kept silent, at first perhaps out of defiance, and then because I could neither think nor speak in your presence. And because you were the person who really brought me up, this has had its repercussions throughout my life. It is altogether a remarkable mistake for you to believe I never complied with your wishes. "Always contrary" was really not my basic principle where you were concerned, as you believe and as you reproach me. On the contrary: if I had obeyed you less, I am sure you would have been much better pleased with me. As it is, all your educational measures hit the mark exactly. There was no hold I tried to escape. As I now am, I am (apart, of course, from the fundamentals and the influence of life itself) the result of your upbringing and of my obedience. That this result is nevertheless distressing to you, indeed that you unconsciously refuse to acknowledge it as the result of your methods of upbringing, is due to the fact that your hand and the material I offered were so alien to each other. You would say: "Not a word of contradiction!" thinking that that was a way of silencing the oppositional forces in me that were disagreeable to you, but the effect of it was too strong for me, I was too docile, I became completely dumb, cringed away from you, hid from you, and only dared to stir when I was so far away from you that your power could no longer reach me—at least not directly. But you were faced with all that, and it all seemed to you to be "contrary," whereas it was only the inevitable consequence of your strength and my weakness.

Your extremely effective rhetorical methods in bringing me up, which never failed to work with me, were: abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and—oddly enough—self-pity. I cannot recall your ever having abused me directly and in downright abusive terms. Nor was that necessary; you had so many other methods, and besides, in talk at home and particularly at the shop the words of abuse went flying around me in such swarms, as they were flung at other people's heads, that as a little boy I was sometimes almost stunned and had no reason not to apply them to myself too, for the people you were abusing were certainly no worse than I was and you were certainly not more displeased with them than with me. And here again was your enigmatic innocence and inviolability; you cursed and swore without the slightest scruple; yet you condemned cursing and swearing in other people and would not have it.

You reinforced abusiveness with threats and this applied to me too. How terrible for me was, for instance, that "I'll tear you apart like a fish," although I knew, of course, that nothing worse was to follow (admittedly, as a little child I didn't know that), but it was almost exactly in accord with my notions of your power, and I saw you as being capable of doing this too. It was also terrible when you ran around the table, shouting, grabbing at one, obviously not really trying to grab, yet pretending to, and Mother (finally) had to rescue one, as it seemed. Once again one had, so it seemed to the child, remained alive through your mercy and bore one's life henceforth as an undeserved gift from you. This is also the place to mention the threats about the consequences of disobedience. When I began to do something you did not like and you threatened me with the prospect of failure, my veneration for your opinion was so great that the failure became inevitable, even though perhaps it happened only at some later time. I lost confidence in my own actions. I was wavering, doubtful. The older I became, the more material there was for you to bring up against me as evidence of my worthlessness; gradually you began really to be right in a certain respect. Once again, I am careful not to assert that I became like this solely through you; you only intensified what was already there, but you intensified it greatly, simply because where I was concerned you were very powerful and you employed all your power to that end.

You put special trust in bringing up children by means of irony, and this was most in keeping with your superiority over me. An admonition from you generally took this form: "Can't you do it in such-and-such a way? That's too hard for you, I suppose. You haven't the time, of course?" and so on. And each such question would be accompanied by malicious laughter and a malicious face. One was, so to speak, already punished before one even knew that one had done something bad. Maddening were also those rebukes in which one was treated as a third person, in other words, considered not worthy even to be spoken to angrily; that is to say, when you would speak ostensibly to Mother but actually to me, who was sitting right there. For instance: "Of course, that's too much to expect of our worthy son," and the like. (This produced a corollary in that, for instance, I did not dare to ask you, and later from habit did not even really much think of asking, anything directly when Mother was there. It was much less dangerous for the child to put questions to Mother, sitting there beside you, and to ask Mother: "How is Father?"—so guarding oneself against surprises.) There were, of course, also cases when one was entirely in agreement with even the worst irony, namely, when it referred to someone else, such as Elli, with whom I was on bad terms for years. There was an orgy of malice and spiteful delight for me when such things were said of her, as they were at almost every meal: "She has to sit ten feet back from the table, the big fat lump," and when you, morosely sitting on your chair without the slightest trace of pleasantness or good humor, a bitter enemy, would exaggeratedly imitate the way she sat, which you found utterly loathsome. How often such things happened, over and over again, and how little you really achieved as a result of them! I think the reason was that the expenditure of anger and malice seemed to be in no proper relation to the subject itself, one did not have the feeling that the anger was caused by this trifle of sitting some way back from the table, but that the whole bulk of it had already been present to begin with, then, only by chance, happened to settle on this matter as a pretext for breaking out. Since one was convinced that a pretext would be found anyway, one did not try very hard, and one's feelings became dulled by these continued threats. One had gradually become pretty sure of not getting a beating, anyway. One became a glum, inattentive, disobedient child, always intent on escape, mainly within one's own self. So you suffered, and so we suffered. From your own point of view you were quite right when, clenching your teeth and with that gurgling laughter that gave the child its first notions of hell, you used to say bitterly (as you did only just recently in connection with a letter from Constantinople): "A nice crowd that is!"

What seemed to be quite incompatible with this attitude toward your children was, and it happened very often, that you openly lamented your situation. I confess that as a child (though probably somewhat later) I was completely callous about this and could not understand how you could possibly expect to get any sympathy from anyone. You were such a giant in every respect. What could you care for our pity or even our help? Our help, indeed, you could not but despise, as you so often despised us ourselves. Hence, I did not take these laments at their face value and looked for some hidden motive behind them. Only later did I come to understand that you really suffered a great deal because of your children; but at that time, when these laments might under different circumstances still have met with a childish, candid sympathy, unhesitatingly ready to offer any help it could, to me they had to seem like overemphatic means of disciplining me and humiliating me, as such not in themselves very intense, but with the harmful side effect that the child became conditioned not to take very seriously the very things it should have taken seriously.

Fortunately, there were exceptions to all this, mostly when you suffered in silence, and affection and kindliness by their own strength overcame all obstacles, and moved me immediately. Rare as this was, it was wonderful. For instance, in earlier years, in hot summers, when you were tired after lunch, I saw you having a nap at the office, your elbow on the desk; or you joined us in the country, in the summer holidays, on Sundays, worn out from work; or the time Mother was gravely ill and you stood holding on to the bookcase, shaking with sobs; or when, during my last illness, you came tiptoeing to Ottla's room to see me, stopping in the doorway, craning your neck to see me, and out of consideration only waved to me with your hand. At such times one would lie back and weep for happiness, and one weeps again now, writing it down.

You have a particularly beautiful, very rare way of quietly, contentedly, approvingly smiling, a way of smiling that can make the person for whom it is meant entirely happy. I can't recall its ever having expressly been my lot in my childhood, but I dare say it may have happened, for why should you have refused it to me at a time when I still seemed blameless to you and was your great hope? Yet in the long run even such friendly impressions brought about nothing but an increased sense of guilt, making the world still more incomprehensible to me.

I would rather keep to the practical and permanent. In order to assert myself even a little in relation to you, and partly too from a kind of vengefulness, I soon began to observe little ridiculous things about you, to collect them and to exaggerate them. For instance, how easily you let yourself be dazzled by people who were only seemingly above you, how you would keep on talking about them, as of some Imperial Councilor or some such (on the other hand, such things also pained me, to see you, my father, believing you had any need of such trifling confirmations of your own value, and boasting about them), or I would note your taste for indecent expressions, which you would produce in the loudest possible voice, laughing about them as though you had said something particularly good, while in point of fact it was only a banal little obscenity (at the same time this again was for me a humiliating manifestation of your vitality). There were, of course, plenty of such observations. I was happy about them; they gave me occasion for whispering and joking; you sometimes noticed it and were angry about it, took it for malice and lack of respect, but believe me, it was for me nothing other than a means—moreover, a useless one—of attempted self-preservation; they were jokes of the kind that are made about gods and kings, jokes that are not only compatible with the profoundest respect but are indeed part and parcel of it.

Incidentally, you too, in keeping with your similar position where I was concerned, tried a similar form of self-defense. You were in the habit of pointing out how exaggeratedly well off I was and how well I had in fact been treated. That is correct but I don't believe it was of any real use to me under the prevailing circumstances. It is true that Mother was endlessly good to me, but for me all that was in relation to you, that is to say, in no good relation. Mother unconsciously played the part of a beater during a hunt. Even if your method of upbringing might in some unlikely case have set me on my own feet by means of producing defiance, dislike, or even hate in me, Mother canceled that out again by kindness, by talking sensibly (in the confusion of my childhood she was the very prototype of good sense and reasonableness), by pleading for me; and I was again driven back into your orbit, which I might perhaps otherwise have broken out of, to your advantage and to my own. Or it happened that no real reconciliation came about, that Mother merely shielded me from you in secret, secretly gave me something, or allowed me to do something, and then where you were concerned I was again the furtive creature, the cheat, the guilty one, who in his worthlessness could only pursue sneaky methods even to get the things he regarded as his right. Of course, I became used to taking such a course also in quest of things to which, even in my own view, I had no right. This again meant an increase in the sense of guilt. It is also true that you hardly ever really gave me a beating. But the shouting, the way your face got red, the hasty undoing of the suspenders and laying them ready over the back of the chair, all that was almost worse for me. It is as if someone is going to be hanged. If he really is hanged, then he is dead and it is all over. But if he has to go through all the preliminaries to being hanged and he learns of his reprieve only when the noose is dangling before his face, he may suffer from it all his life. Besides, from the many occasions on which I had, according to your clearly expressed opinion, deserved a beating but was let off at the last moment by your grace, I again accumulated only a huge sense of guilt. On every side I was to blame, I was in your debt.

You have always reproached me (either alone or in front of others, since you have no feeling for the humiliation of the latter, and your children's affairs were always public) for living in peace and quiet, warmth and abundance, lacking nothing, thanks to your hard work. I think of remarks that must positively have worn grooves in my brain, such as: "When I was only seven I had to push a handcart from village to village." "We all had to sleep in one room." "We were glad when we got potatoes." "For years I had open sores on my legs because I did not have enough warm clothes." "I was only a little boy when I was sent to Pisek to work in a store." "I got nothing from home, not even when I was in the army, but still I managed to send money home." "But for all that, for all that—Father was always Father to me. Ah, nobody knows what that means these days! What do these children know? Nobody's been through that! Does any child understand such things today?" Under other conditions such stories might have been very educational, they might have been a way in encouraging one and strengthening one to endure torments and deprivations similar to those one's father had undergone. But that wasn't what you wanted at all; the situation had, after all, become quite different as a result of all your efforts, and there was no opportunity to distinguish oneself as you had done. Such an opportunity would first of all have had to be created by violence and revolutions, it would have meant breaking away from home (assuming one had had the resolution and strength to do so and that Mother wouldn't have worked against it, for her part, with other means) But that was not what you wanted at all, that you termed ingratitude, extravagance, disobedience, treachery, madness. And so, while on the one hand you tempted me to it by means of example, story, and humiliation, on the other hand you forbade it with the utmost severity. Otherwise, for instance you ought to have been delighted with Ottla's Zürau escapade*—apart from the accompanying circumstances. She wanted to get back to the country from which you had come, she wanted work and hardship such as you had had, she did not want to depend on the fruits of your labor, just as you yourself were independent of your father. Were those such dreadful intentions? Was that so remote from your example and your precept? Well, Ottla's intentions finally came to nothing in practice, were indeed perhaps carried out in a somewhat ridiculous way, with too much fuss, and she did not have enough consideration for her parents. But was that exclusively her fault and not also the fault of the circumstances and, above all, of the fact that you were so estranged from her? Was she any less estranged from you (as you later tried to convince yourself) in the business than afterward at Zürau? And would you not quite certainly have had the power (assuming you could have brought yourself to do so) to turn that escapade into something very good by means of encouragement, advice, and supervision, perhaps even merely by means of toleration?

*Refers to his sister Ottla's taking over the management of a farm in the German-Bohemian town of Zürau. Kafka spent time with her there during his illness in 1917-18. (Ed.)

In connection with such experiences you used to say, in bitter jest, that we were too well off. But that joke is, in a sense, no joke at all. What you had to fight for we received from your hand, but the fight for external life, a fight that was instantly open to you and which we are, of course, not spared either, we now have to fight for only late in life, in our maturity but with only childish strength. I do not say that our situation is therefore inevitably less favorable than yours was, on the contrary, it is probably no better and no worse (although this is said without reference to our different natures), only we have the disadvantage of not being able to boast of our wretchedness and not being able to humiliate anyone with it as you have done with your wretchedness. Nor do I deny that it might have been possible for me to really enjoy the fruits of your great and successful work; that I could have turned them to good account and, to your joy, continued to work with them; but here again, our estrangement stood in the way. I could enjoy what you gave, but only in humiliation, weariness, weakness, and with a sense of guilt. That was why I could be grateful to you for everything only as a beggar is, and could never show it by doing the right things.

The next external result of this whole method of upbringing was that I fled everything that even remotely reminded me of you. First, the business. In itself, especially in my childhood, so long as it was still a simple shop, I ought to have liked it very much, it was so full of life, lit up in the evening, there was so much to see and hear; one was able to help now and then, to distinguish oneself, and, above all, to admire you for your magnificent commercial talents, for the way you sold things, managed people, made jokes, were untiring, in case of doubt knew how to make the right decision immediately, and so forth; even the way you wrapped a parcel or opened a crate was a spectacle worth watching; all this was certainly not the worst school for a child. But since you gradually began to terrify me on all sides and the business and you became one thing for me, the business too made me feel uneasy. Things that had at first been a matter of course for me there now began to torment and shame me, particularly the way you treated the staff. I don't know, perhaps it was the same in most businesses (in the Assicurazioni Generali, for instance, in my time it was really similar, and the explanation I gave the director for my resignation was, though not strictly in accordance with the truth, still not entirely a lie: my not being able to bear the cursing and swearing, which incidentally had not actually been directed at me; it was something to which I had become too painfully sensitive from home), but in my childhood other businesses did not concern me. But you I heard and saw shouting, cursing, and raging in the shop, in a way that in my opinion at that time had no equal anywhere in the world. And not only cursing, but other sorts of tyrannizing. For instance, the way you pushed goods you did not want to have mixed up with others off the counter—only the thoughtlessness of your rage was some slight excuse—and how the clerk had to pick them up. Or your constant comment about a clerk who had TB: "The sooner that sick dog croaks the better." You called the employees "paid enemies," and that was what they were, but even before they became that, you seemed to me to be their "paying enemy." There, too, I learned the great lesson that you could be unjust; in my own case I would not have noticed it so soon, for there was too much accumulated sense of guilt in me ready to admit that you were right; but in the shop, in my childish view—which later, of course, became somewhat modified, although not too much so—were strangers, who were after all, working for us and for that reason had to live in constant dread of you. Of course I exaggerated, because I simply assumed you had as terrible an effect on these people as on me. If it had been so, they could not have lived at all; since, however they were grown-up people, most of them with excellent nerves, they shook off this abuse without any trouble and in the end it did you much more harm than it did them. But it made the business insufferable to me, reminding me far too much of my relations with you; quite apart from your proprietary interest and apart from your mania for domination even as a businessman, you were so greatly superior to all those who ever came to learn the business from you that nothing they ever did could satisfy you, and you must, as I assumed, in the same way be forever dissatisfied with me too. That was why I could not help siding with the staff; I did it also, by the way, because from sheer nervousness I could not understand how anyone could be so abusive to a stranger, and therefore—from sheer nervousness and for no other reason than my own security—I tried to reconcile the staff, which must, I thought, be in a terrible state of indignation, with you and with our family. To this end it was not enough for me to behave in an ordinary decent way toward the staff, or even modestly; more than that, I had to be humble, not only be first to say "good morning" or "good evening," but if at all possible I had to forestall any return of the greeting. And even if I, insignificant creature that I was, down below, had licked their feet it would still have been no compensation for the way that you, the master, were lashing out at them up above. This relationship that I came to have toward my fellow man extended beyond the limits of the business and on into the future (something similar, but not so dangerous and deep—going as in my case, is for instance Ottla's taste for associating with poor people, sitting together with the maids, which annoys you so much, and the like). In the end I was almost afraid of the business and, in any case, it had long ceased to be any concern of mine even before I went to the Gymnasium and hence was taken even further away from it. Besides, it seemed to be entirely beyond my resources and capacities since, as you said, it exhausted even yours. You then tried (today this seems to me both touching and shaming) to extract, nevertheless, some little sweetness for yourself from my dislike of the business, of your world—a dislike that was after all very distressing to you—by asserting that I had no business sense, that I had loftier ideas in my head, and the like. Mother was, of course, delighted with this explanation that you wrung from yourself, and I too, in my vanity and wretchedness, let myself be influenced by it. But if it had really been only or mainly "loftier ideas" that turned me against the business (which I now, but only now, have come really and honestly to hate), they would have had to express themselves differently, instead of letting me float quickly and timidly through my schooling and my law studies until I finally landed at a clerk's desk.

If I was to escape from you, I had to escape from the family as well, even from Mother. True, one could always get protection from her, but only in relation to you. She loved you too much and was too devoted and loyal to you to have been for long an independent spiritual force in the child's struggle. This was, incidentally, a correct instinct of the child, for with the passing of the years Mother became ever more closely allied to you; while, where she herself was concerned, she always kept her independence, within the narrowest limits, delicately and beautifully, and without ever essentially hurting you, still, with the passing of the years she more and more completely, emotionally rather than intellectually, blindly adopted your judgments and your condemnations with regard to the children, particularly in the case—certainly a grave one—of Ottla. Of course, it must always be borne in mind how tormenting and utterly wearing Mother's position in the family was. She toiled in the business and in the house, and doubly suffered all the family illnesses, but the culmination of all this was what she suffered in her position between us and you. You were always affectionate and considerate toward her, but in this respect, you spared her just as little as we spared her. We all hammered ruthlessly away at her, you from your side, we from ours. It was a diversion, nobody meant any harm, thinking of the battle that you were waging with us and that we were waging with you, and it was Mother who got the brunt of all our wild feelings. Nor was it at all a good contribution to the children's upbringing the way you—of course, without being in the slightest to blame for it yourself—tormented her on our account. It even seemed to justify our otherwise unjustifiable behavior toward her. How she suffered from us on your accounts and from you on our account, even without counting those cases in which you were in the right because she was spoiling us, even though this "spoiling" may sometimes have been only a quiet, unconscious counterdemonstration against your system. Of course, Mother could not have borne all this if she had not drawn the strength to bear it from her love for us all and her happiness in that love.

My sisters were only partly on my side. The one who was happiest in her relation to you was Valli. Being closest to Mother, she fell in with your wishes in a similar way, without much effort and without suffering much harm. And because she reminded you of Mother, you did accept her in a more friendly spirit, although there was little Kafka material in her. But perhaps that was precisely what you wanted; where there was nothing of the Kafka's, even you could not demand anything of the sort, nor did you feel, as with the rest of us, that something was getting lost which had to be saved by force. Besides, it may be that you were never particularly fond of the Kafka element as it manifested itself in women. Valli's relationship to you would perhaps have become even friendlier if the rest of us had not disturbed it somewhat.

Elli is the only example of the almost complete success of a breaking away from your orbit. When she was a child she was the last person I should have expected it of. For she was such a clumsy, tired, timid, bad-tempered, guilt-ridden, overmeek, malicious, lazy, greedy, miserly child, I could hardly bring myself to look at her, certainly not to speak to her, so much did she remind me of myself, in so very much the same way was she under the same spell of our upbringing. Her miserliness was especially abhorrent to me, since I had it to an, if possible, even greater extent. Miserliness is, after all, one of the most reliable signs of profound unhappiness; I was so unsure of everything that, in fact, I possessed only what I actually had in my hands or in my mouth or what was at least on the way there, and this was precisely what she, being in a similar situation, most enjoyed taking away from me. But all this changed when, at an early age—this is the most important thing—she left home, married, had children, and became cheerful, carefree, brave, generous, unselfish, and hopeful. It is almost incredible how you did not really notice this change at all, or at any rate did not give it its due, blinded as you were by the grudge you have always borne Elli and fundamentally still bear her to this day; only this grudge matters much less now, since Elli no longer lives with us and, besides, your love for Felix and your affection for Karl have made it less important. Only Gerti sometimes has to suffer for it still.

I scarcely dare write of Ottla; I know that by doing so I jeopardize the whole effect I hope for from this letter. In ordinary circumstances, that is, so long as she is not in particular need or danger, all you feel is only hatred for her; you yourself have confessed to me that in your opinion she is always intentionally causing you suffering and annoyance and that while you are suffering on her account she is satisfied and pleased. In other words, a sort of fiend. What an immense estrangement, greater still than that between you and me, must have come about between you and her, for such an immense misunderstanding to be possible. She is so remote from you that you scarcely see her any more, instead, you put a specter in the place where you suppose her to be. I grant you that you have had a particularly difficult time with her. I don't, of course, quite see to the bottom of this very complicated case, but at any rate here was something like a kind of Löwy, equipped with the best Kafka weapons. Between us there was no real struggle; I was soon finished off; what remained was flight, embitterment, melancholy, and inner struggle. But you Two were always in a fighting position, always fresh, always energetic. A sight as magnificent as it was desperate. At the very beginning you were, I am sure, very close to each other, because of the four of us Ottla is even today perhaps the purest representation of the marriage between you and Mother and of the forces it combined. I don't know what it was that deprived you both of the happiness of the harmony between father and child, but I can't help believing that the development in this case was similar to that in mine. On your side there was the tyranny of your own nature, on her side the Löwy defiance, touchiness, sense of justice, restlessness, and all that backed by the consciousness of the Kafka vigor. Doubtless I too influenced her, but scarcely of my own doing, simply through the fact of my existence. Besides, as the last to arrive, she found herself in a situation in which the balance of power was already established, and was able to form her own judgment from the large amount of material at her disposal. I can even imagine that she may, in her inmost being, have wavered for some time as to whether she should fling herself into your arms or into those of the adversaries; and it is obvious that at that time there was something you failed to do and that you rebuffed her, but if it had been possible, the Twoof you would have become a magnificently harmonious pair. That way I should have lost an ally, but the sight of you Twowould have richly compensated me; besides, the incredible happiness of finding complete contentment at least in one child would have changed you much to my advantage. All this, however, is today only a dream. Ottla has no contact with her father and has to seek her way alone, like me, and the degree of confidence, self-confidence, health, and ruthlessness by which she surpasses me makes her in your eyes more wicked and treacherous than I seem to you. I understand that. From your point of view she can't be different. Indeed, she herself is capable of regarding herself with your eyes, of feeling what you suffer and of being—not desperate (despair is my business) but very sad. You do see us together often enough, in apparent contradiction to this, whispering and laughing, and now and then you hear us mentioning you. The impression you get is that of impudent conspirators. Strange conspirators. You are, admittedly, a chief subject of our conversations, as of our thoughts ever since we can remember, but truly, not in order to plot against you do we sit together, but in order to discuss—with all our might and main, jokingly and seriously, in affection, defiance, anger, revulsion, submission, consciousness of guilt, with all the resources of our heads and hearts—this terrible trial that is pending between us and you, to examine it in all its details, from all sides, on all occasions, from far and near—a trial in which you keep on claiming to be the judge, whereas, at least in the main (here I leave a margin for all the mistakes I may naturally make) you are a party too, just as weak and deluded as we are. An example of the effect of your methods of upbringing, one that is very instructive in the context of the whole situation, is the case of Irma. On the one hand, she was, after all, a stranger, already grown up when she entered your business, and had to deal with you mainly as her employer, so that she was only partially exposed to your influence, and this at an age when she had already developed powers of resistance; yet, on the other hand, she was also a blood relation, venerating you as her father's brother, and the power you had over her was far greater than that of a mere employer. And despite all this she, who, with her frail body, was so efficient, intelligent, hard-working, modest, trustworthy, unselfish, and loyal, who loved you as her uncle and admired you as her employer, she who proved herself in previous and in subsequent positions, was not a very good clerk to you. Her relationship with you was, in fact, nearly that of one of your children—pushed into that role, naturally, by us, too—and the power of your personality to bend others was, even in her case, so great that (admittedly only in relation to you and, it is to be hoped, without the deeper suffering of a child) she developed forgetfulness, carelessness, a sort of gallows humor, and perhaps even a shade of defiance, in so far as she was capable of that at all. And I do not even take into account that she was ailing, and not very happy in other respects either, and that she was burdened by a bleak home life. What was so illuminating to me in your relation to her, you yourself summed up in a remark that became classical for us, one that was almost blasphemous, but at the same time extraordinary evidence of the naïveté of your way of treating people: "The late lamented has left me quite a mess."

I might go on to describe further orbits of your influence and of the struggle against it, but there I would be entering uncertain ground and would have to construct things and, apart from that, the farther you are away from your business and your family, the pleasanter you have always become, easier to get on with, better mannered, more considerate, and more sympathetic (I mean outwardly, too), in exactly the same way as for instance an autocrat, when he happens to be outside the frontiers of his own country, has no reason to go on being tyrannical and is able to associate good-humoredly even with the lowest of the low. In fact, in the group photographs taken at Franzensbad, for instance, you always looked as big and jolly, among those sulky little people, as a king on his travels. This was something, I grant you, from which your children might have benefited too, if they had been capable of recognizing this even as little children, which was impossible; and if I, for one, had not had to live constantly within the inmost, strictest, binding ring of your influence, as, in fact, I did.

Not only did I lose my family feeling, as you say; on the contrary, I did indeed have a feeling about the family, mostly in a negative sense, concerned with the breaking away from you (which, of course could never be done completely). Relations with people outside the family, however, suffered possibly still more under your influence. You are entirely mistaken if you believe I do everything for other people out of affection and loyalty, and for you and the family nothing, out of coldness and betrayal. I repeat for the tenth time: Even in other circumstances I should probably have become a shy and nervous person, but it is a long dark road from there to where I have really come. (Up to now I have intentionally passed over in silence relatively little in this letter, but now and later I shall have to keep silent about some things that are still too hard for me to confess—to you and to myself. I say this in order that if the picture as a whole should be somewhat blurred here and there, you should not believe that this is due to lack of evidence; on the contrary, there is evidence that might well make the picture unbearably stark. It is not easy to find a middle way.) Here, it is enough to remind you of early days. I had lost my self-confidence where you were concerned, and in its place had developed a boundless sense of guilt. (In recollection of this boundlessness I once wrote of someone, accurately: "He is afraid the shame will outlive him.") I could not suddenly change when I was with other people; rather, I came to feel an even deeper sense of guilt with them, for, as I have already said, I had to make up to them for the wrongs you had done them in your business, wrongs in which I too had my share of responsibility. Besides, you always had some objection to make, frankly or covertly, about everyone I associated with, and for this too I had to atone. The mistrust that you tried to instill into me toward most people, at business and at home (name a single person who was of importance to me in my childhood whom you didn't at least once tear to shreds with your criticism), was, oddly enough, of no particular burden to you (you were strong enough to bear it; besides, it was perhaps really only a token of the autocrat). This mistrust (which was nowhere confirmed in the eyes of the little boy, since everywhere I saw only people excellent beyond any hope of emulation) turned in me to mistrust of myself and perpetual anxiety about everything else. There, then, I was in general certain of not being able to escape from you. That you were mistaken on this point was perhaps due to your actually never learning anything about my association with other people; and mistrustfully and jealously (I don't deny, do I, that you are fond of me?) you assumed that I had to compensate elsewhere for the lack of a family life, since it must be impossible that away from home I should live in the same way. Incidentally, in this respect, it was precisely in my childhood that I did find a certain comfort in my very mistrust of my own judgment. I would say to myself: "Oh, you're exaggerating, you tend too much to feel trivialities as great exceptions, the way young people always do." But this comfort I later lost almost entirely, when I gained a clearer perspective of the world.

I found just as little escape from you in Judaism. Here some measure of escape would have been thinkable in principle, moreover, it would have been thinkable that we might both have found each other in Judaism or that we even might have begun from there in harmony. But what sort of Judaism was it that I got from you? In the course of the years, I have taken roughly three different attitudes to it. As a child I reproached myself, in accord with you, for not going to the synagogue often enough, for not fasting, and so on. I thought that in this way I was doing a wrong not to myself but to you, and I was penetrated by a sense of guilt, which was, of course, always near at hand.

Later, as a young man, I could not understand how, with the insignificant scrap of Judaism you yourself possessed, you could reproach me for not making an effort (for the sake of piety at least, as you put it) to cling to a similar, insignificant scrap. It was indeed, so far as I could see, a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke. Four days a year you went to the synagogue, where you were, to say the least, closer to the indifferent than to those who took it seriously, patiently went through the prayers as a formality, sometimes amazed me by being able to show me in the prayer book the passage that was being said at the moment, and for the rest, so long as I was present in the synagogue (and this was the main thing) I was allowed to hang around wherever I liked. And so I yawned and dozed through the many hours (I don't think I was ever again so bored, except later at dancing lessons) and did my best to enjoy the few little bits of variety there were, as for instance when the Ark of the Covenant was opened, which always reminded me of the shooting galleries where a cupboard door would open in the same way whenever one hit a bull's-eye; except that there something interesting always came out and here it was always just the same old dolls without heads. Incidentally, it was also very frightening for me there, not only, as goes without saying, because of all the people one came into close contact with, but also because you once mentioned in passing that I too might be called to the Torah. That was something I dreaded for years. But otherwise I was not fundamentally disturbed in my boredom, unless it was by the bar mitzvah, but that demanded no more than some ridiculous memorizing, in other words, it led to nothing but some ridiculous passing of an examination; and, so far as you were concerned, by little, not very significant incidents, as when you were called to the Torah and passed, in what to my way of feeling was a purely social event, or when you stayed on in the synagogue for the prayers for the dead, and I was sent away, which for a long time—obviously because of the being sent away and the lack of any deeper interest—aroused in me the more or less unconscious feeling that something indecent was about to take place.—That's how it was in the synagogue; at home it was, if possible, even poorer, being confined to the first Seder, which more and more developed into a farce, with fits of hysterical laughter, admittedly under the influence of the growing children. (Why did you have to give way to that influence? Because you had brought it about.) This was the religious material that was handed on to me, to which may be added at most the outstretched hand pointing to "the sons of the millionaire Fuchs," who attended the synagogue with their father on the High Holy Days. How one could do anything better with that material than get rid of it as fast as possible, I could not understand; precisely the getting rid of it seemed to me to be the devotes action.

Still later, I did see it again differently and realized why it was possible for you to think that in this respect too I was malevolently betraying you. You really had brought some traces of Judaism with you from the ghetto-like village community; it was not much and it dwindled a little more in the city and during your military service; but still, the impressions and memories of your youth did just about suffice for some sort of Jewish life, especially since you did not need much help of that kind, but came of robust stock and could personally scarcely be shaken by religious scruples unless they were strongly mixed with social scruples. Basically the faith that ruled your life consisted in your believing in the unconditional rightness of the opinions of a certain class of Jewish society, and hence actually, since these opinions were part and parcel of your own nature, in believing in yourself. Even in this there was still Judaism enough, but it was too little to be handed on to the child; it all dribbled away while you were passing it on. In part, it was youthful memories that could not be passed on to others; in part, it was your dreaded personality. It was also impossible to make a child, overacutely observant from sheer nervousness, understand that the few flimsy gestures you performed in the name of Judaism, and with an indifference in keeping with their flimsiness, could have any higher meaning. For you they had meaning as little souvenirs of earlier times, and that was why you wanted to pass them on to me, but since they no longer had any intrinsic value even for you could do this only through persuasion or threat; on the one hand, this could not be successful, and on the other, it had to make you very angry with me on account of my apparent obstinacy, since you did not recognize the weakness of your position in this.

The whole thing is, of course, no isolated phenomenon. It was much the same with a large section of this transitional generation of Jews, which had migrated from the still comparatively devout countryside to the cities. It happened automatically; only, it added to our relationship, which certainly did not lack in acrimony, one more sufficiently painful source for it. Although you ought to believe, as I do, in your guiltlessness in this matter too, you ought to explain this guiltlessness by your nature and by the conditions of the times, not merely by external circumstances; that is, not by saying, for instance, that you had too much work and too many other worries to be able to bother with such things as well. In this manner you tend to twist your undoubted guiltlessness into an unjust reproach to others. That can be very easily refuted everywhere and here too. It was not a matter of any sort of instruction you ought to have given your children, but of an exemplary life. Had your Judaism been stronger, your example would have been more compelling too; this goes without saying and is, again, by no means a reproach, but only a refutation of your reproaches. You have recently been reading Franklin's memoirs of his youth. I really did purposely give you this book to read, though not, as you ironically commented, because of a little passage on vegetarianism, but because of the relationship between the author and his father, as it is there described, and of the relationship between the author and his son, as it is spontaneously revealed in these memoirs written for that son. I do not wish to dwell here on matters of detail.

I have received a certain retrospective confirmation of this view of your Judaism from your attitude in recent years, when it seemed to you that I was taking more interest in Jewish matters. As you have in advance an aversion to every one of my activities and especially to the nature of my interest, so you have had it here too. But in spite of this, one could have expected that in this case you would make a little exception. It was, after all, Judaism of your Judaism that was coming to life here, and with it also the possibility of entering into a new relationship between us. I do not deny that, had you shown interest in them, these things might, for that very reason, have become suspect in my eyes. I do not even dream of asserting that I am in this respect any better than you are. But it never came to the test. Through my intervention Judaism became abhorrent to you, Jewish writings unreadable; they "nauseated" you.—This may have meant you insisted that only that Judaism which you had shown me in my childhood was the right one, and beyond it there was nothing. Yet that you should insist on it was really hardly thinkable. But then the "nausea" (apart from the fact that it was directed primarily not against Judaism but against me personally) could only mean that unconsciously you did acknowledge the weakness of your Judaism and of my Jewish upbringing, did not wish to be reminded of it in any way, and reacted to any reminder with frank hatred. Incidentally, your negative high esteem of my new Judaism was much exaggerated; first of all, it bore your curse within it, and secondly in its development the fundamental relationship to one's fellow men was decisive, in my case that is to say fatal.

You struck closer to home with your aversion to my writing and to everything that, unknown to you, was connected with it. Here I had, in fact, got some distance away from you by my own efforts, even if it was slightly reminiscent of the worm that, when a foot treads on its tail end, breaks loose with its front part and drags itself aside. To a certain extent I was in safety; there was a chance to breathe freely. The aversion you naturally and immediately took to my writing was, for once, welcome to me. My vanity, my ambition did suffer under your soon proverbial way of hailing the arrival of my books: "Put it on my bedside table!" (usually you were playing cards when a book came), but I was really quite glad of it, not only out of rebellious malice, not only out of delight at a new confirmation of my view of our relationship, but quite spontaneously, because to me that formula sounded something like: "Now you are free!" Of course it was a delusion; I was not, or, to put it most optimistically, was not yet, free. My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you, yet, although it was enforced by you, it did take its course in the direction determined by me. But how little all this amounted to! It is only worth talking about because it happened in my life, otherwise it would not even be noted; and also because in my childhood it ruled my life as a premonition, later as a hope, and still later often as despair, and it dictated—yet again in your shape, it may be said—my few small decisions.

For instance, the choice of a career. True, here you gave me complete freedom, in your magnanimous and, in this regard, even indulgent manner. Although here again you were conforming to the general method of treating sons in the Jewish middle class, which was the standard for you, or at least to the values of that class. Finally, one of your misunderstandings concerning my person played a part in this too. In fact, out of paternal pride, ignorance of my real life, and conclusions drawn from my feebleness, you have always regarded me as particularly diligent. As a child I was, in your view, always studying, and later always writing. This does not even remotely correspond to the facts. It would be more correct, and much less exaggerated, to say that I studied little and learned nothing; that something did stick in my mind after those many years is, after all, not very remarkable, since I did have a moderately good memory and a not too inferior capacity for learning; but the sum total of knowledge and especially of a solid grounding of knowledge is extremely pitiable in comparison with the expenditure of time and money in the course of an outwardly untroubled, calm life, particularly also in comparison with almost all the people I know. It is pitiable, but to me understandable. Ever since I could think, I have had such profound anxieties about asserting my spiritual and intellectual existence that I was indifferent to everything else. Jewish schoolboys in our country often tend to be odd; among them one finds the most unlikely things; but something like my cold indifference, scarcely disguised, indestructible, childishly helpless, approaching the ridiculous, and brutishly complacent, the indifference of a self-sufficient but coldly imaginative child, I have never found anywhere else; to be sure, it was the sole defense against destruction of the nerves by fear and by a sense of guilt. All that occupied my mind was worry about myself, and this in various ways. There was, for instance, the worry about my health; it began imperceptibly enough, with now and then a little anxiety about digestion, hair falling out, a spinal curvature, and so on; intensifying in innumerable gradations, it finally ended with a real illness. But since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed to be provided at every instant with a new confirmation of my existence, since nothing was in my very own, undoubted, sole possession, determined unequivocally only by me—in sober truth a disinherited son—naturally I became unsure even to the thing nearest to me, my own body. I shot up, tall and lanky, without knowing what to do with my lankiness, the burden was too heavy, the back became bent; I scarcely dared to move, certainly not to exercise, I remained weakly; I was amazed by everything I could still command as by a miracle, for instance, my good digestion; that sufficed to lose it, and now the way was open to every sort of hypochondria; until finally under the strain of the superhuman effort of wanting to marry (of this I shall speak later), blood came from the lung, something in which the apartment in the Schönbornpalais—which, however, I needed only because I believed I needed it for my writing, so that even this belongs here under the same heading—may have had a fair share. So all this did not come from excessive work, as you always imagine. There were years in which, in perfectly good health, I lazed away more time on the sofa than you in all your life, including all your illnesses. When I rushed away from you, frightfully busy, it was generally in order to lie down in my room. My total achievement in work done, both at the office (where laziness is, of course, not particularly striking, and besides, mine was kept in bounds by my anxiety) and at home, is minute; if you had any real idea of it, you would be aghast. Probably I am constitutionally not lazy at all, but there was nothing for me to do. In the place where I lived I was spurned, condemned, fought to a standstill; and to escape to some other place was an enormous exertion, but that was not work, for it was something impossible, something that was, with small exceptions, unattainable for me.

This was the state in which I was given the freedom of choice of a career. But was I still capable of making any use of such freedom? Had I still any confidence in my own capacity to achieve a real career? My valuation of myself was much more dependent on you than on anything else, such as some external success. That was strengthening for a moment, nothing more, but on the other side your weight always dragged me down much more strongly. Never shall I pass the first grade in grammar school, I thought, but I succeeded, I even got a prize; but I shall certainly not pass the entrance exam for the Gymnasium, but I succeeded; but now I shall certainly fail in the first year at the Gymnasium; no, I did not fail, and I went on and on succeeding. This did not produce any confidence, however; on the contrary, I was always convinced—and I had positive proof of it in your forbidding expression—that the more I achieved, the worse the final outcome would inevitably be. Often in my mind's eye I saw the terrible assembly of the teachers (the Gymnasium is only the most obvious example, but it was the same all around me), as they would meet, when I had passed the first class, and then in the second class, when I had passed that, and then in the third, and so on, meeting in order to examine this unique, outrageous case, to discover how I, the most incapable, or at least the most ignorant of all, had succeeded in creeping up so far as this class, which now, when everybody's attention had at last been focused on me, would of course instantly spew me out, to the jubilation of all the righteous liberated from this nightmare. To live with such fantasies is not easy for a child. In these circumstances, what could I care about my lessons? Who was able to strike a spark of real interest in me? Lessons, and not only lessons but everything around me, interested me as much, at that decisive age, as an embezzling bank clerk, still holding his job and trembling at the thought of discovery, is interested in the petty ongoing business of the bank, which he still has to deal with as a clerk. That was how small and faraway everything was in comparison to the main thing. So it went on up to the qualifying exams which I really passed partly only through cheating, and then everything came to a standstill, for now I was free. If I had been concerned only with myself up to now, despite the discipline of the Gymnasium, how much more so now that I was free. So there was actually no such thing for me as freedom to choose my career, for I knew: compared to the main thing everything would be exactly as much a matter of indifference to me as all the subjects taught at school, and so it was a matter of finding a profession that would let me indulge this indifference without injuring my vanity too much. Law was the obvious choice. Little contrary attempts on the part of vanity, of senseless hope, such as a fortnight's study of chemistry, or six months' German studies, only reinforced that fundamental conviction. So I studied law. This meant that in the few months before the exams, and in a way that told severely on my nerves, I was positively living in an intellectual sense, on sawdust, which had moreover already been chewed for me in thousands of other people's mouths. But in a certain sense this was exactly to my taste, as in a certain sense the Gymnasium had been earlier, and later my job as a clerk, for it all suited my situation. At any rate, I did show astonishing foresight; even as a small child I had had fairly clear premonitions about my studies and my career. From this side I did not expect rescue; here I had given up long ago.

But I showed no foresight at all concerning the significance and possibility of a marriage for me; this up to now greatest terror of my life has come upon me almost completely unexpectedly. The child had developed so slowly, these things were outwardly all too remote; now and then the necessity of thinking of them did arise; but the fact that here a permanent, decisive and indeed the most grimly bitter ordeal loomed was impossible to recognize. In reality, however, the marriage plans turned out to be the most grandiose and hopeful attempts at escape, and, consequently their failure was correspondingly grandiose.

I am afraid that because in this sphere everything I try is a failure, I shall also fail to make these attempts to marry comprehensible to you. And yet the success of this whole letter depends on it, for in these attempts there was, on the one hand, concentrated everything I had at my disposal in the way of positive forces, and, on the other hand, there also accumulated, and with downright fury, all the negative forces that I have described as being the result in part of your method of upbringing, that is to say, the weakness, the lack of self-confidence, the sense of guilt, and they positively drew a cordon between myself and marriage. The explanation will be hard for me also because I have spent so many days and nights thinking and burrowing through the whole thing over and over again that now even I myself am bewildered by the mere sight of it. The only thing that makes the explanation easier for me is your—in my opinion—complete misunderstanding of the matter; to correct slightly so complete a misunderstanding does not seem excessively difficult.

First of all you rank the failure of the marriages with the rest of my failures; I should have nothing against this provided you accepted my previous explanation of my failure as a whole. It does, in fact, form part of the same series, only you underrate the importance of the matter, underrating it to such an extent that whenever we talk of it we are actually talking about quite different things. I venture to say that nothing has happened to you in your whole life that had such importance for you as the attempts at marriage have had for me. By this I do not mean that you have not experienced anything in itself as important; on the contrary, your life was much richer and more care-laden and more concentrated than mine, but for that very reason nothing of this sort has happened to you. It is as if one person had to climb five low steps and another person only one step, but one that is, at least for him, as high as all the other five put together; the first person will not only manage the five, but hundreds and thousands more as well, he will have led a great and very strenuous life, but none of the steps he has climbed will have been of such importance to him as for the second person that one, firstly high step, that step which it is impossible for him to climb even by exerting all his strength, that step which he cannot get up on and which he naturally cannot get past either.

Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all. That so many seem to succeed in this is no evidence to the contrary; first of all, there are not many who do succeed, and second, these not-many usually don't "do" it, it merely "happens" to them; although this is not that utmost, it is still very great and very honorable (particularly since "doing" and "happening" cannot be kept clearly distinct). And finally, it is not a matter of this utmost at all, anyway, but only of some distant but decent approximation; it is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on Earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.

How was I prepared for this? As badly as possible. This is apparent from what has been said up to now. In so far as any direct preparation of the individual and any direct creation of the general basic conditions exist, you did not intervene much outwardly. And it could not be otherwise; what is decisive here are the general sexual customs of class, nation, and time. Yet you did intervene here too—not much, for such intervention must presuppose great mutual trust, and both of us had been lacking in this even long before the decisive time came—and not very happily, because our needs were quite different; what grips me need hardly touch you at all, and vice versa; what is innocence in you may be guilt in me, and vice versa; what has no consequences for you may be the last nail in my coffin.

I remember going for a walk one evening with you and Mother; it was on Josephsplatz near where the Lander bank is today; and I began talking about these interesting things, in a stupidly boastful, superior, proud, detached (that was spurious), cold (that was genuine), and stammering manner, as indeed I usually talked to you, reproaching the Twoof you with having left me uninstructed; with the fact that my schoolmates first had to take me in hand, that I had been close to great dangers (here I was brazenly lying, as was my way, in order to show myself brave, for as a consequence of my timidity I had, except for the usual sexual misdemeanors of city children, no very exact notion of these "great dangers"); but finally I hinted that now, fortunately, I knew everything, no longer needed any advice, and that everything was all right. I had begun talking about all this mainly because it gave me pleasure at least to talk about it, and also out of curiosity, and finally to avenge myself somehow on the Twoof you for something or other. In keeping with your nature you took it quite simply, only saying something to the effect that you could give me advice about how I could go in for these things without danger. Perhaps I did want to lure just such an answer out of you; it was in keeping with the prurience of a child overfed with meat and all good things, physically inactive, everlastingly occupied with himself; but still, my outward sense of shame was so hurt by this—or I believed it ought to be so hurt—that against my will I could not go on talking to you about it and, with arrogant impudence, cut the conversation short.

It is not easy to judge the answer you gave me then; on the one hand, it had something staggeringly frank, sort of primeval, about it; on the other hand, as far as the lesson itself is concerned, it was uninhibited in a very modern way. I don't know how old I was at the time, certainly not much over sixteen. It was, nevertheless, a very remarkable answer for such a boy, and the distance between the Twoof us is also shown in the fact that it was actually the first direct instruction bearing on real life I ever received from you. Its real meaning, however, which sank into my mind even then, but which came partly to the surface of my consciousness only much later, was this: what you advised me to do was in your opinion and even more in my opinion at that time, the filthiest thing possible. That you wanted to see to it that I should not bring any of the physical filth home with me was unimportant, for you were only protecting yourself, your house. The important thing was rather that you yourself remained outside your own advice, a married man, a pure man, above such things; this was probably intensified for me at the time by the fact that even marriage seemed to me shameless; and hence it was impossible for me to apply to my parents the general information I had picked up about marriage. Thus you became still purer, rose still higher. The thought that you might have given yourself similar advice before your marriage was to me utterly unthinkable. So there was hardly any smudge of earthly filth on you at all. And it was you who pushed me down into this filth—just as though I were predestined to it with a few frank words. And so, if the world consisted only of me and you (a notion I was much inclined to have), then this purity of the world came to an end with you and, by virtue of your advice, thc filth began with me. In itself it was, of course, incomprehensible that you should thus condemn me; only old guilt, and profoundest contempt on your side, could explain it to me. And so again I was seized in my innermost being—and very hard indeed.

Here perhaps both our guiltlessness becomes most evident. A gives B a piece of advice that is frank, in keeping with his attitude to life, not very lovely but still, even today perfectly usual in the city, a piece of advice that might prevent damage to health. This piece of advice is for B morally not very invigorating—but why should he not be able to work his way out of it, and repair the damage in the course of the years? Besides, he does not even have to take the advice; and there is no reason why the advice itself should cause B's whole future world to come tumbling down. And yet something of this kind does happen, but only for the very reason that A is you and B is myself. This guiltlessness on both sides I can judge especially well because a similar clash between us occurred some twenty years later, in quite different circumstances—horrible in itself but much less damaging—for what was there in me, the thirty-six-year-old, that could still be damaged? I am referring to a brief discussion on one of those few tumultuous days that followed the announcement of my latest marriage plans. You said to me something like this: "She probably put on a fancy blouse, something these Prague Jewesses are good at, and right away, of course, you decided to marry her. And that as fast as possible, in a week, tomorrow, today. I can’t understand you: after all, you're a grown man, you live in the city, and you don't know what to do but marry the first girl who comes along. Isn't there anything else you can do? If you're frightened, I'll go with you." You put it in more detail and more plainly, but I can no longer recall the details, perhaps too things became a little vague before my eyes, I paid almost more attention to Mother who, though in complete agreement with you, took something from the table and left the room with it.

You have hardly ever humiliated me more deeply with words and shown me your contempt more clearly. When you spoke to me in a similar way twenty years earlier, one might, looking at it through your eyes, have seen in it some respect for the precocious city boy, who in your opinion could already be initiated into life without more ado. Today this consideration could only intensify the contempt, for the boy who was about to make his first start got stuck halfway and today does not seem richer by any experience, only more pitiable by twenty years. My choice of a girl meant nothing at all to you. You had (unconsciously) always suppressed my power of decision and now believed (unconsciously) that you knew what it was worth. Of my attempts at escape in other directions you knew nothing, thus you could not know anything either of the thought processes that had led me to this attempt to marry, and had to try to guess at them, and in keeping with your general opinion of me, you interpreted them in the most abominable, crude, and ridiculous light. And you did not for a moment hesitate to tell me this in just such a manner. The shame you inflicted on me with this was nothing to you in comparison to the shame that I would, in your opinion, inflict on your name by this marriage.

Now, regarding my attempts at marriage there is much you can say in reply, and you have indeed done so: you could not have much respect for my decision since I had twice broken the engagement with F. and had twice renewed it, since I had needlessly dragged you and Mother to Berlin to celebrate the engagement, and the like. All this is true—but how did it come about?

The fundamental thought behind both attempts at marriage was quite sound: to set up house, to become independent.

An idea that does appeal to you, only in reality it always turns out like the children's game in which one holds and even grips the other's hand, calling out: "Oh, go away, go away, why don't you go away?" Which in our case happens to be complicated by the fact that you have always honestly meant this "go away!" and have always unknowingly held me, or rather held me down, only by the strength of your personality.

Although both girls were chosen by chance, they were extraordinarily well chosen. Again a sign of your complete misunderstanding, that you can believe that I—timid, hesitant, suspicious—can decide to marry in a flash, out of delight over a blouse. Both marriages would rather have been commonsense marriages, in so far as that means that day and night—the first time for years, the second time for months—all my power of thought was concentrated on the plan. Neither of the girls disappointed me, only I disappointed both of them. My opinion of them is today exactly the same as when I wanted to marry them.

It is not true either that in my second marriage attempt I disregarded the experience gained from the first attempt, that I was rash and careless. The cases were quite different; precisely the earlier experience held out a hope for the second case, which was altogether much more promising. I do not want to go into details here.

Why then did I not marry? There were certainly obstacles, as there always are, but then, life consists in confronting such obstacles. The essential obstacle, however, which is, unfortunately, independent of the individual case, is that obviously I am mentally incapable of marrying. This manifests itself in the fact that from the moment I make up my mind to marry I can no longer sleep, my head burns day and night, life can no longer be called life, I stagger about in despair. It is not actually worries that bring this about; true, in keeping with my sluggishness and pedantry countless worries are involved in all this, but they are not decisive; they do, like worms, complete the work on the corpse, but the decisive blow has come from elsewhere. It is the general pressure of anxiety, of weakness, of self-contempt.

I will try to explain it in more detail. Here, in the attempt to marry, Twoseemingly antagonistic elements in my relations with you unite more intensely than anywhere else. Marriage certainly is the pledge of the most acute form of self-liberation and independence. I would have a family, in my opinion the highest one can achieve, and so too the highest you have achieved; I would be your equal; all old and even new shame and tyranny would be mere history. It would be like a fairy tale, but precisely there lies the questionable element. It is too much; so much cannot be achieved. It is as if a person were a prisoner, and he had not only the intention to escape, which would perhaps be attainable, but also, and indeed simultaneously, the intention to rebuild the prison as a pleasure dome for himself. But if he escapes, he cannot rebuild, and if he rebuilds, he cannot escape. If I, in the particular unhappy relationship in which I stand to you, want to become independent, I must do something that will have, if possible, no connection with you at all; though marrying is the greatest thing of all and provides the most honorable independence, it also stands at the same time in the closest relation to you. To try to get out of this quandary has therefore a touch of madness about it, and every attempt is punished by being driven almost mad.

It is precisely this close relation that partly lures me toward marrying. I picture the equality which would then arise between us—and which you would be able to understand better than any other form of equality—as so beautiful because then I could be a free, grateful, guiltless, upright son, and you could be an untroubled untyrannical, sympathetic, contented father. But to this end everything that ever happened would have to be undone, that is, we ourselves should have to be canceled out.

But we being what we are, marrying is barred to me because it is your very own domain. Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. And, in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are not many and not very comforting regions—and marriage is not among them.

This very comparison proves that I certainly do not mean to say that you drove me away from marriage by your example, as you had driven me away from your business. Quite the contrary, despite the remote similarity. In your marriage I had before me what was, in many ways, a model marriage, a model in constancy, mutual help, number of children; and even when the children grew up and increasingly disturbed the peace, the marriage as such remained undisturbed. Perhaps I formed my high idea of marriage on this model; the desire for marriage was powerless for other reasons. Those lay in your relation to your children, which is, after all, what this whole letter is about.

There is a view according to which fear of marriage sometimes has its source in a fear that one's children would some day pay one back for the sins one has committed against one's own parents. This, I believe, has no very great significance in my case, for my sense of guilt actually originates in you, and is filled with such conviction of its uniqueness—indeed, this feeling of uniqueness is an essential part of its tormenting nature—that any repetition is unthinkable. All the same, I must say that I would find such a mute, glum, dry, doomed son unbearable; I daresay that, if there were no other possibility, I would flee from him, emigrate, as you had planned to do if I had married. And this may also have had some influence on my incapacity to marry.

What is much more important in all this, however, is the anxiety about myself. This has to be understood as follows: I have already indicated that in my writing, and in everything connected with it, I have made some attempts at independence, attempts at escape, with the very smallest of success; they will scarcely lead any farther; much confirms this for me. Nevertheless it is my duty or, rather, the essence of my life, to watch over them, to let no danger that I can avert, indeed no possibility of such a danger, approach them. Marriage bears the possibility of such a danger, though also the possibility of the greatest help; for me, however, it is enough that there is the possibility of a danger. What should I do if it did turn out to be a danger! How could I continue living in matrimony with the perhaps unprovable, but nevertheless irrefutable feeling that this danger existed? Faced with this I may waver, but the final outcome is certain: I must renounce. The simile of the bird in the hand and the Two in the bush has only a fiery remote application here. In my hand I have nothing, in the bush is everything, and yet—so it is decided by the conditions of battle and the exigency of life—I must choose the nothing. I had to make a similar choice when I chose my profession.

The most important obstacle to marriage, however, is the no longer eradicable conviction that what is essential to the support of a family and especially to its guidance, is what I have recognized in you; and indeed everything rolled into one, good and bad, as it is organically combined in you—strength, and scorn of others, health, and a certain immoderation, eloquence and inadequacy, self-confidence and dissatisfaction with everyone else, a worldly wisdom and tyranny, knowledge of human nature and mistrust of most people; then also good qualities without any drawback, such as industry, endurance, presence of mind, and fearlessness. By comparison I had almost nothing or very little of all this; and was it on this basis that I wanted to risk marrying, when I could see for myself that even you had to fight hard in marriage and, where the children were concerned, had even failed? Of course, I did not put this question to myself in so many words and I did not answer it in so many words; otherwise everyday thinking would have taken over and shown me other men who are different from you (to name one, near at hand, who is very different from you: Uncle Richard) and yet have married and have at least not collapsed under the strain, which is in itself a great deal and would have been quite enough for me. But I did not ask this question, I lived it from childhood on. I tested myself not only when faced with marriage, but in the face of every trifle; in the face of every trifle you by your example and your method of upbringing convinced me, as I have tried to describe, of my incapacity; and what turned out to be true of every trifle and proved you right, had to be fearfully true of the greatest thing of all: of marriage. Up to the time of my marriage attempts I grew up more or less like a businessman who lives from day to day, with worries and forebodings, but without keeping proper accounts. He makes a few small profits—which he constantly pampers and exaggerates in his imagination because of their rarity—but otherwise he has daily losses. Everything is entered, but never balanced. Now comes the necessity of drawing a balance, that is, the attempt at marriage. And with the large sums that have to be taken into account here it is as though there had never been even the smallest profit, everything one single great liability. And now marry without going mad!

That is what my life with you has been like up to now, and these are the prospects inherent in it for the future.

If you look at the reasons I offer for the fear I have of you, you might answer: "You maintain I make things easy for myself by explaining my relation to you simply as being your fault, but I believe that despite your outward effort, you do not make things more difficult for yourself, but much more profitable. At first you too repudiate all guilt and responsibility; in this our methods are the same. But whereas I then attribute the sole guilt to you as frankly as I mean it, you want to be 'overly clever' and 'overly affectionate' at the same time and acquit me also of all guilt. Of course, in the latter you only seem to succeed (and more you do not even want), and what appears between the lines, in spite of all the 'turns of phrase' about character and nature and antagonism and helplessness, is that actually I have been the aggressor, while everything you were up to was self-defense. By now you would have achieved enough by your very insincerity, for you have proved three things: first, that you are not guilty; second, that I am the guilty one; and third, that out of sheer magnanimity you are ready not only to forgive me but (what is both more and less) also to prove and be willing to believe yourself that—contrary to the truth—I also am not guilty. That ought to be enough for you now, but it is still not enough. You have put it into your head to live entirely off me. I admit that we fight with each other, but there are Two kinds of combat. The chivalrous combat, in which independent opponents pit their strength against each other, each on his own, each losing on his own, each winning on his own. And there is the combat of vermin, which not only sting but, on top of it, suck your blood in order to sustain their own life. That's what the real professional soldier is, and that's what you are. You are unfit for life; to make life comfortable for yourself, without worries and without self-reproaches, you prove that I have taken your fitness for life away from you and put it in my own pocket. Why should it bother you that you are unfit for life, since I have the responsibility for it, while you calmly stretch out and let yourself be hauled through life, physically and mentally, by me. For example: when you recently wanted to marry, you wanted—and this you do, after all, admit in this letter—at the same time not to marry, but in order not to have to exert yourself you wanted me to help you with this not-marrying, by forbidding this marriage because of the 'disgrace' this union would bring upon my name. I did not dream of it. First, in this as in everything else I never wanted to be 'an obstacle to your happiness,' and second, I never want to have to hear such a reproach from my child. But did the self-restraint with which I left the marriage up to you do me any good? Not in the least. My aversion to your marriage would not have prevented it; on the contrary, it would have been an added incentive for you to marry the girl, for it would have made the 'attempt at escape,' as you put it, complete. And my consent to your marriage did not prevent your reproaches, for you prove that I am in any case to blame for your not marrying. Basically, however, in this as in everything else you have only proved to me that all my reproaches were justified, and that one especially justified charge was still missing: namely, the charge of insincerity, obsequiousness and parasitism. If I am not very much mistaken, you are preying on me even with this letter itself."

My answer to this is that, after all, this whole rejoinder— which can partly also be turned against you—does not come from you, but from me. Not even your mistrust of others is as great as my self-mistrust, which you have bred in me. I do not deny a certain justification for this rejoinder, which in itself contributes new material to the characterization of our relationship. Naturally things cannot in reality fit together the way the evidence does in my letter; life is more than a Chinese puzzle. But with the correction made by this rejoinder—a correction I neither can nor will elaborate in detail—in my opinion something has been achieved which so closely approximates the truth that it might reassure us both a little and make our living and our dying easier

Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins; revised by Arthur S. Wensinger
COPYRIGHT Schocken Books Inc

Forward & Backward

2011-10-22T12:49:00.000-05:00

I had the best week ever, I mean seriously the BEST. I apologize in advance for the low level of detail - nature of the awesomeness. My professional self is growing, gentle reader, and it is an exciting time I will soon be able to share here (wink wink is that enough of a hint for you? I can do an email post if there's interest).

In other news, today is my last day of being 28. This year in my life has been incredible - healthy, active, and lucky. I take 5 classes a week at the gym. I have such a feeling of personal satisfaction - like I'm impressing myself by working hard, and I don't have to feel bad for feeling good. I don't know if that makes sense... I've lost 20 pounds since April. I look forward to my gym classes. I feel a pride that I'm still going strong. I like being an "exerciser" - I like feeling strong and healthy. Feels pretty awesome.

I've been trying to be my best self. It helps me believe that I deserve to be happy. It's a fragile little feeling, even naming it threatens to destroy it. A cheerleader in my head who says "you can do it!" is staying around a little longer, maybe getting a louder voice to argue back with the chorus of negativity I'm working to banish from my psyche. I feel more than ever before that I am okay, that I am worthy, that others cannot take away my flame.

A hug to you, whomever you are at this moment reading. I'm sending out massive joy beams in every direction. Just turn your heart toward Chicago and you'll catch one. Nurture your flame. I'm behind you 100%.