Marc Moini

Hi Ron, yes, it is my hope as well that as more people heal they will be able to support others and thus accelerate healing for others, as well as, over time, reduce the number and severity of wounds people everywhere are receiving.

Alice Miller explains in For Your Own Good how children who were mistreated and humiliated by their 'caretakers' and who couldn't rebel against those they depended on, as a survival strategy ended up pushing out of their awareness both this abuse and their need for self-affirmation, and now as adults if they don't become aware of all this and heal themselves then the usual way in which their long suppressed needs get satisfied is when they in turn abuse others with less power, often their own children. Here's the PDF http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/alicemiller.pdfIn the Articles on alice-miller.com (if I remember correctly), she says this explains why the Israeli state, many of whose members suffered grave abuse from Nazis, has been heaping similar abuse on the captive and helpless Palestinians.It seems to me that this mechanism can account for much of the violence going on today, whether in families or schools or cities and countries and in wars.If this is accurate enough, then my question is how do we fix this? As far as I can tell, and please let me know if you see errors or omissions:1) by understanding how we were each of us affected by the abuse we received (I think Alice Miller is correct when she says that the vast majority of people are affected by this), including getting clear who harmed us in and what ways. To do this she says we need someone to help us see exactly where we were in fact mistreated, because the strong habit we have developed of not bringing our attention to this makes it difficult for us to see it by ourselves (this person’s role is to support us, never to lead us)2) then by staying with this realization until we integrate this missing side of our history and and as a result reclaim our lost ability to feel the full range of emotions we would have had if we had been allowed to develop harmoniously. This seems to be a gradual process where the first 80% takes months if not years (my supposition). 3) and then looking at how we may have in turn hurt others when we had the power to do so, and checking whether the reason we harmed them is that we had been harmed ourselves and we were largely unconsciously playing out the effects of that harm, and then extending these ideas to those who harmed us and seeing how they perhaps had also been victims, and whether it’s possible that most of the abuse in the world can be explained this way.

In my previous comment maybe I forgot a step. When I feel a strong emotion like fear or sadness that makes me long to be comforted and reassured, I can get the security I need by: 1) Remembering to turn to myself instead of looking for someone else 2) Imagining myself being faced with the present situation when I was a child. This can make the deep source of the emotion more apparent, in my experience (versus what triggers it in the present). 3) Self-empathizing, for example asking myself "are you afraid because you think you are going to get badly hurt if you don't succeed at appeasing this person?"

You're welcome, Mike. So far it seems to me that once I've realized that it is possible for me to meet these needs myself, which was quite a novel idea for me, the rest is a matter of 1) remembering to turn to myself instead of looking for someone else, when I need security and to be comforted and reassured, and 2) practicing self-empathy. And to practice self-empathy, the most effective way I've found is to keep studying and practicing NonViolent Communication (also called Connected Communication or Compassionate Communication). This has proved very difficult to understand for me, maybe because it is such a different way of thinking from the one I was brought up with. It took me over a year just to begin to understand what they mean by "needs", and my impression is that I'm still not fluent in thinking in terms of feelings and needs, 3 years in. It's like learning to think in a new language, it takes a lot of practice. One trick that has made a big difference for me is to talk to myself saying "you". As in "Are you depressed because you're telling yourself that you're no good?" Somehow this seems to engage processes in my mind that make it easier to feel what's going on inside, but this may be something personal to me as I've always found it easier to figure things out when talking to someone. I'm interested in hearing any ideas about any of this! -------(I wanted to post a separate reply to Ron but it keeps getting added to my reply to Mike)---- Thanks for your kind words, Ron, and I'm glad you found what I wrote about my understanding of these mechanisms useful. It seems some of these ideas resonated with you and you are pondering them and considering the implications for how you perceive your internal world, and you are getting some clarity in the process, and hoping to reach more soon.

I hope this will be useful to you, it’s an example of applying the principles I'm learning from Nathaniel Branden and Alice Miller and Marshall Rosenberg: I bought a used phone last week and after fixing some parts I realized it was locked and I didn't know how to get past that. The next day while preparing lunch and thinking about this problem I felt like a flushing inside my whole body, intense fear, I almost fainted, I guess from blood getting sucked into the spleen in anticipation for a life-threatening blow. Facing the thought that I had made “a mistake" in not thinking ahead enough when making this purchase was overwhelming. Using Alice Miller's idea that this exaggerated fear is likely a reaction to events in my childhood, I thought of how I grew up being very careful not to get caught doing anything I might get in trouble for, and the link became clear. If as a child I had spent money on a useless locked phone my dad would have been very angry with me because I wouldn’t have been a son he could have been proud of, which I guess unconsciously triggered in him the fear he felt from his childhood when he needed to be a perfect son otherwise his dad would be angry, etc. in a repetition going back from parent to child possibly many generations. As a child I wasn't aware of being afraid, probably because allowing myself to feel this intense fear would have hampered me in doing whatever I needed to do to not get caught. As a result I learned to repress this fear along with most of the events associated with it. Until I read Alice Miller's books and articles (alice-miller.com) and until I tried to imagine myself as a child whenever I experienced one of these strong and puzzling reactions, I was surprised to not be able to remember how afraid I felt in the few instances I did remember being threathened or hit. Now the repression is lifting and the fear is gradually coming back. The next step was to do something about the fear. Realizing that the adult I am now wasn’t in immediate danger standing there in the kitchen brought some relief, but not enough. The fear had been replaced by feeling helpless and lonely, I still didn’t know how to get the phone to work and stop the thoughts of “I am no good”. I longed for comforting arms, someone to understand what I was feeling, who would support me through it. Again this brought me back to my first years, how I didn’t get this comfort and support, and how my reaction had been to put all of it out of my mind because these experiences of abandonment had been too painful (mostly my father getting angry at me and yelling and hitting, whereas I looked up to him for protection and guidance, and my mother who could barely protect us children from him and found it difficult to comfort me when I needed it). This next realization, that once more it was unmet needs from the past that were affecting the present and causing these feelings, brought some more relief and I was able to go through the rest of the day without being so hard on myself when thinking of what to do with this telephone. Looking online for information on the effects of abandonment and how to recover from them, I found http://abandonment.net/articles where I read that fear of abandonment is really the primal fear and it is part of being human, and so the problem isn’t so much having this fear, as how we handle it (although people who live through extreme abandonment such as losing a parent during early childhood can be affected much more than most and it can be much more difficult for them to train to reassure themselves). Laying sleepless at 5am the next night thinking through all this, things then fell into place (most of these past 3 years I've spent doing self-work, this didn't come to me easily). Here was the idea I had been missing in order to better understand Nathaniel Branden’s statement “Nobody is coming to save you” and Marshall Rosenberg’s “It’s our responsibility to meet our own needs”. I had been thinking that I needed someone else to get reassurance from, as a child I had expected this from my mother and because she hadn’t been able to give me this past my first year I think, from around 7 I turned to looking for reassurance from girlfriends. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be able to comfort and reassure myself. I am now training to give myself the security I need and so far it seems to be working, I am feeling more energy and more calm, less worrying and less confusion. So this is an example of how this process has been progressing for me, making sense of my past and understanding my needs and beginning to take steps to meet them. If you have any suggestions or comments I’m interested in hearing them. I want to express my gratitude to Nathaniel Branden and Alice Miller and Carl Rogers and Marshall Rosenberg, whose work helped me understand the importance of feelings and emotions (otherwise I wouldn’t have recognized it was fear and helpessness and loneliness that I felt, as I couldn’t recognize or admit to these feelings in myself, before), and how to think in terms of meeting universal human needs instead of thinking in terms of morally right and morally wrong, and to learn what self-esteem is and how to develop it. I am also grateful to Wes Bertrand for introducing me to this body of knowledge and for helping me make sense of it. And I also have immense gratitude for the friend who showed interest in helping me explore my childhood and reconnect with my feelings, instead of only having an intellectual understanding of them, and thus to unlock my empathy. (That’s why I had and I think most people today have very little empathy, because of this unconscious repression defense and not because we are “sociopaths” who have no capacity for empathy). Other friends have helped me as well, such as LovePrevails and Lens here on FDR. And recently I’ve been lucky to be able to trade with a student therapist who trains on me as a test client while I get an hour of support each week for free, which I’m very happy for because I would have trouble paying for that much therapy right now. A big Thank You to all! To give you an idea of how big a change this has been for me: before having children I spent a decade reading psychology and self-help books, and the best I could find were Virgina Satir’s books, which helped me some but didn’t help me understand the mechanisms at play. I did go to therapy as well, but the 2 therapists I saw apparently didn’t understand this either. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to come across all these important ideas and these high-empathy people in recent years, which in pre-internet times were even more difficult to chance upon, I would have kept on repressing all these feelings and memories, and upon seeing that the phone was blocked I would likely have found someone else to blame and got angry at them, such as my ex-wife, thinking it was her fault for having burdened me with trivialities that had thrown off my concentration and brought about this “mistake”. Or I would have gotten angry at my children. I used to go to any length to escape recognizing my part in any mishap, because I had this overwhelming fear that I was trying hard to not become aware of.

Hi Lens, I hope you're well. I want to thank you for pointing me to Alice Miller's work last year. I finally read The drama of the gifted child, and For your own good, which I found free online. I realize I had gotten the wrong idea about her ideas from what I read/heard here at FDR. Reading her own words, I see that I had misunderstood, and/or maybe her views have largely been misunderstood here. I found much in these 2 books that I hadn't understood before, and it opened possibilities for new growth. I agree with everything she says, and I only see a few details where I think it would be possible to clarify more. I'm looking forward to reading her other books. Also I want to thank you for your advice ("when you have a compulsive action that you want to do and you feel you cannot hold yourself from doing it like compulsive eating or gardening or anything that you feel you have to do is a sign that your inner child is calling for attention and at that moment step back"), which at the time I think I didn't understand the way you meant it. 3 months ago my son invited one of his friends to spend the afternoon here and afterwards I was tempted to clean so I went back and re-read that thread and tried to sense how I would feel if I was back to my childhood years and I realized that I would be very afraid of getting punished if I didn't do what my dad thought I should. So I found that this fear, which helped me avoid getting punished, and which I had hid from myself ever since because it was dangerous to feel it, was the deeper cause that was pushing me to clean. Simply feeling that I was afraid and recognizing that I had a need for safety wasn't enough, it was also necessary for me to recognize how lonely I had felt as a child from not getting the love and understanding I needed, and until this occasion after having read your advice, I hadn't been able to get in touch with it because I hadn't thought of imagining myself going back to being a child. for Is this what you meant? Now that I've been reconnecting with this loneliness in addition to the fear and that I've been taking steps to meet my need for love, my progress towards being completely free of this "compulsion" and a couple of related ones I found in the meantime, has accelerated. So I'm grateful to you.

Thanks! I'm glad to know that And I'm returning the compliment!

The reason I stopped writing this is because it occurred to me that perhaps others as well found it irritating. I don't see anyone else writing this in their forum posts, so I'm guessing it is part of forum etiquette and it just took me a long time to figure it out. Perhaps I wouldn't have, if you hadn't told me directly, so I'm grateful to you for that. I am convinced that in general, yes, we all sometimes hear in others' words things that they don't mean, because as you say communication is imperfect.

I used to enjoy writing "Best wishes, Marc", but not anymore, since you say you hear it as something demeaning, if I understand correctly. Yes I think you (just like anybody else) make the best choices for yourself at any given time, though at a later time you might think of other choices that you would have preferred. We learn and we change, but at each instant, I think we're always making the best choice between the alternatives that we see available to us in that moment (and our mind might be clouded by emotion right then, so we might see less alternatives than we would if we were calmer). Someone else might make a different choice, but they're not us living what we're living in that moment. No I don't think you will accept anything people suggest. I don't think you make up fantasies about what I think, it seems to me that in general communication is imperfect and as a result of that all of us are potentially hearing in other people's words things that they don't mean in the way we take it.

Yes, after a while (and after you told me), I figured that you didn't like it when I would end my posts with that. For me "Best wishes, Marc" was something I wrote because I meant it, I wanted to convey that I care for each person I write to, but it sounds like you heard it as me insulting you, like I thought you didn't know who it was that was writing, or maybe that it wasn't sincere. Just like I get the impression that you got the sense that I think you're not making the best choices for yourself, or that you will reject anything people suggest, when I don't think any of that.

Hi Rob, thanks for explaining, I appreciate it. I'm glad you're happy with the progress you're making. And journaling has been and is very useful to me as well.

Thanks for confirming. I'm afraid that anything I suggest you will reject, because the way I see it what you are after the most is to know that the choices you make for yourself are the best ones for you. Plus I suppose you already know that the ideas I think can help people in general be happier, are mainly those of Marshall Rosenberg and Nathaniel Branden. I watched part of your video about your inner critic, and my impression is that IFS can be an effective way for some people to find things about themselves, but I don't use it or recommend it myself because I'm afraid it would prevent me from feeling at peace. I believe with the ideas I've learned from the people named above, I can figure out what's happening in me, the various feelings I have and what causes them, whether this cause is some needs (NVC ones) or some thoughts, and then I can usually figure out from that, what to do so I can feel happy and at peace. If you have any thoughts that might help me, I'm all ears.

I enjoyed remembering this period of my life that I wrote about, and in general I enjoy if I can contribute in some way to someone's happiness. Do you resent that I asked you if what I wrote helps? That's the impression I get, that you want consideration and that asking you if it helped, went against that.

Rob_Ilir, thanks for replying. So you were testing me, or rather testing yourself to find out if you can tell whether someone is saying the truth or not, whether their "true self" is in control or not? I wonder if in general you're feeling somewhat unsettled, afraid or insecure, and if what you're trying to accomplish on this board by finding signs of me or others "being controlled by a false self" is to figure out how to have your "true self" be in full control, how to be at peace with yourself and the world. I think that's a great goal to have.

I had a friend, from when I was 19 to 29, who was over 20 years older. He became a sort of surrogate father for me, since my own father wasn't there. I learned a lot from him, he had started a handful of companies, he had spent his time in the army in jail because he didn't want to submit, he and some of his friends used to ram police vans around Paris with their large american cars and turn them over (that was back in the 70's), he used to get into a lot of fights, including gunfights with gypsies, from what he said. He was a real character, seemingly not afraid of anything, and I spent a lot of time with him, we started a software company together, me doing the software and him taking care of the business side. Actually I was doing both, since he didn't speak English and all our clients were in the US. But I thought that he knew what do to, and that I was learning from him. In fact neither of us knew, and we just bluffed our way into incredible deals, with me being completely unconcerned because I thought he had it under control and I just wasn't able to tell. I knew what I could do on the technical side, but we sold my work at prices I'd never had dreamed of, because with the attitude we had people believed they were getting their money's worth. I actually think now that it was fair, it's just that by myself I was undervaluing my work. This was 1987 to 1993 when the Macintosh was a desktop publishing machine, our clients were big companies like SuperMac or Central Point Software and they thought they were dealing with a cutting-edge european software house, when it was just me working at home, sometimes asking for help from a friend or two. Towards the end, when I had been doing everything including handling clients alone for a couple of years, I realized that my friend actually wasn't contributing anything anymore, because by then I had learned everything I could learn from him. I had learned how to talk to clients and close deals, how to drive cars and motorcycles (he used to do european 250cc motorcycle races), and a lot about life in general, and I was starting to notice inconsistencies in what he was doing and saying. He was an obsessive womanizer, and I realized it was from insecurity. He pretended to have all this wisdom, yet one of his sons, who was 17, killed himself (didn't mean to, took a knife to his own gut to make his girlfriend come back apparently, but the ambulance didn't arrive for an hour). I wondered why he had been spending so much time with me all these years, when his children needed him, and I realized that a major reason was that I was his way of making money. I had been looking for a guide, someone to help me make sense of this world and where I fit, and he had pretended to know more than he did, partly in order to exploit me. That was a huge disappointment. I haven't talked with him since, though now I would, now that I am able to put all of this into perspective and understand that it wasn't something personal against me, he was just scared he wouldn't be able to feed his family and he didn't know how to do this any better than by lying to me. The thing that saddened me the most was the thought that I had failed my children, when their mother left because we couldn't solve the disagreements between us. That and leaving them at her house after each time they're here. I'm still sad about this, each time, though it's slowly getting better as I see that they're suffering less now that we're talking more and more about what's bothering each of us, i.e. the communication between us is getting good enough that each person feels heard and accepted. When I'm wondering what to do, where to go, I listen in, and if I can't tell then I take it as easy as I can, doing only the minimum I absolutely need to do to live, and I try to do kind things for myself. Like take time to go outside and enjoy sights and sounds and smells and the touch of nature, such as going barefoot in the forest after the rain, or going into the ocean and swimming or surfing. Or even just taking my shirt off and catching 5 minutes of sun outside my door. That really helps. Just not rushing, taking time to enjoy life, even small things. This eventually gets me back to feeling at peace, and then I just do whatever I can, that seems like a good idea. If I feel some resistance inside, when I think of doing something, then I don't do that thing, because it doesn't seem worth it, to do something if it goes against myself. It seems to be working, overall I feel much more at peace now than I remember feeling before, and it's not the dull anaesthesia of dissociation that I used to feel, I do get moments of intense joy as well as moments of strong pain or sadness, but I'm ok with all of it. Does any of this help?