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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.