Brains being washed to protect our parents and the Family Myth.

• A sensitive topic that may rise your fierce protest.

Many of us will no doubt react negatively on the focus of this issue, -our parents and caretakers. They are the reason for our life, they usually love us strongly, and they most likely try to help  us out of trouble. They often pay for us when we are  broke, support us when we lose our job, comfort us when we are down, and do many other things for us, that nobody else would do . Then why bother complaining about them, you may ask? Give them critic and opposition?

In many ways you are perfectly  right, – at least for the reasons I have just mentioned.  Parents usually do what they can to be at our side, throughout their lives. Often though they also have severe  limitations  in their view of themselves and their children, not to mention in regard to their ways of acting towards us.

More important than that, they have had immediate access  all through our childhood to our amazing brains with the 85 billion neurons and the 1000-10.000 connections that every braincell can make with other braincells in our head. That’s much more influence than any political extremist kidnapper may ever dream of with his victims!

But instead of blaming our parents and caretakers immediately, let’s  lift our perspective of the family in our society, – one or two levels up.

We all know about adolescent rebellion against parents. We know very well about teenagers’ loud and sometimes even violent rage against their mothers and fathers. But in some way this is accepted in our culture as a generational revolt against the old fashioned.

Youth protests, rebellion and sabotage of family values and rules.

This juvenile revolt is in som way comparable to a spring awakening. A spring in nature, washing out the winter of traditional conduct, values and way of life, and opening for a new bloom. But the change is seasonal and only temporary. Soon autumn and winter returns, with business going on as usual.

Spring awakening in nature

And the phenomenon of riot beetween generations is not new. Even at the time of Socrates the old philosophers were extremely worried about the young generation’s attitudes and values in general.

“Fuck you all, and go to hell!”

– A sound and healthy protest.

In our time the eras of jazz, rock, and then Beatles and Rolling Stones, are examples of clashes of culture between the old established musical trends and the new and provocative style of music that went hand in hand with a new fashion image regarding both clothing and hairstyle.

   The Beatles in 1962

Later we had the student riots in Paris in 1968’s, and fierce protests against the war in Vietnam in the US.

 The famous student riots in Paris 1968

This period was in the West  followed by two typical mass reactions by the younger generation. The flower power movement,  and the associated cannabis drug culture, with the;  “make love not war” slogans. A mass movement  uniting, the political, the cultural, spiritual, anarchistic, and anti- war, anti-nuclear enthusiast in one big  non-hierarchic and colorful family.

The great Woodstock festival in New York 1969 is perhaps the best event to symbolize this merge of different youth protests in the late 60’s. Woodstock Festival at White Water, New York in 1969.

In earlier posts I have advocated for a new image of man. http://www.selvuniverset.com/2016/09/23/humans-nature-good-well-treated/. http://www.selvuniverset.com/2016/03/18/is-the-biggest-treath-in-the-world-you-and-me/

This I have done on an evident scientific basis that proves the present image of man to be very contextless and skewed . More than skewed, it happens to be both misunderstood and false. And this image of us has resulted in all too many wars, too much poverty and too little cooperation and sharing of the world’s natural resources.

– Bad role models

I have earlier argued, through examples that prominent strategic and competitive business bosses, as well as political leaders function as role models for the rest of us. They somewhat represent the image of the successful human being in life.  As role models they have the power of definition over both ourselves and the image of man.   

          How do the role models in media influence our image of man?

Our most influencing brainwashing institutions

If we take a glance at some of the society’s most influential institutions we often mention, the kindergarten, the school, the church, mosque, or synagogue, and of course the Congress, Parliament, Bundestag, or what you name the building  where all political parties go together and decide your countries future.

       School, Church,  Parliament and Congress as important institutions in society.

Family has the greatest influence on you

The institution that supersede all these other institutions is the family.  In the beginning parents have 100% percent access to the child’s brain, body and emotions. They can affect this very advanced and complex physical and psychical system on every level. This they can do at a time when the child is at its most perceptive and vulnerable. And the effect of this influence will stay engraved in this little human being’s flesh, bone and mind, for the rest of it’s life.

     Adams Family representing a  typical family when you demasque it?

– The family-burden and hidden pain

The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller once wrote a book called “For Your own Good”.  It is about the disastrous effects of child rearing. Here Miller proposed that German traumatic childrearing produced heroin addicts like Christiane F., serial child killers like Jürgen Bartsch, and dictators like Adolf Hitler.

Christiane F.      Jurgen Bartsch, Serial killer            Hitlerbaby

Children learn to accept their parents’ often abusive behavior against them as being “for their own good.” In the case of Hitler, it led to displacement against the Jews and other minority groups.  For Miller, the traditional teaching procedures practiced in German schools were manipulative, resulting in grown-up adults deferring excessively to authorities, even to tyrannical leaders or dictators, like Hitler.

    The real Hitler as a baby

We must remind ourselves that Hitler most probably also was a very nice and sensitive child in the beginning. But his father was extremely demanding, reproachful, taunting, and also moody. Not in the least he was punitive. When little Adolph had built a model ship, that he was very proud of, and his father entered his room wanting to see his mathematic homework, Adolph could not produce it.

Illusstration photo of spanking as a Method og childrearing

The father went into a formidable rage and crashed the boat totally and spanked his son with 36 strokes on his bottom. This was one of Hitler’s greatest moments in life. For the first time he managed not to cry, when his father hit him or spanked him! He was so proud. (Some thirty years later he made 6 million Jews and their families to cry instead!)

   Victims of Holocost 1944

We have talked much about traumas on my website. (http://www.selvuniverset.com/2016/09/08/traumas-how-do-we-deal-with-them/) I consider these untreated personal and national traumas to be the biggest obstacle to successful negotiations and peacemaking.  A child will read mother and fathers intentions and psychology very fast. He will know to adapt to the family system rules and taboos, the do’s and the don’ts.

The things we don’t speak about in our families are often the hidden pain and the generational traumas that are untreated and most often unacknowledged. What kind of traumas does this encompass?

What kinds of pain do families usually hide?

Let me give some examples of different kinds of psychophysical pain. There are many ,many more, but I start with these: You have for example a grandmother’s sudden death, a grandfather’s imprisonment for fraud. You have mothers experience of rape thirteen years old, or an uncle who committed suicide after incest with her, when she was ten. Mother’s fight and divorce from your difficult biological father.

You have a father raised as a foster child, when his own biological family collapsed in drugs and addictive conduct. You also have the mother who lost her first expected child in labor and could not attach properly to her next newborn child, or contrary overprotected it.

You have myths of fragility or resilience, fear and contempt for so called weakness, and on the other hand strong admiration for stamina and strength. All these likes and dislikes, fear and attractions, most often covering family tragedies, or accidents, that were attributed to personal properties, and weaknesses, of a special person or persons in one or another branch on the family tree.

Then with all this and much more on a family’s merit list, most families “decide”;- not to talk about it, and even “better” to repress it or forget it. But all families also have a non-verbal, gestural and acting-out language that tells more about the underlying truth than most of us believe.

 Senator Rick Santorinis Family.

Non-verbal signs or actions that reveal the underlying pain.

A mother’s spells of rage, and throwing dishes in the wall, father’s depending on alcohol to stabilize his mood swings, father’s constant nagging on his son, mother’s invading closeness to the same boy, that is only four examples of acting-out a hidden family drama. And a child sense or perceives the hidden non-verbal darkness behind all this. It senses it as a black hole of untold danger.

But since the child have no tags to hang this intuitive knowledge on, he or she is confused and bewildered. This might induce a somewhat constant unconscious stress on the young person. This stress cannot be tagged by the child or by the family, and thereby addressed where it belongs. And that location is originally not in the child, but in one of the grown up parents or both of them.

               A stressed infant without any tags to understand whats going on

Even the parents might be in some way innocent or ignorant of the root of the family blind spot or black hole. But as grown-ups and parents it is their obligation and duty to unveil deep hidden obstacles in the family that might burden the child with a consciousness that in many ways cannot be open to the truth.

To open up the family’s real history

Of course it is a demanding almost impossible imperative for a family to be totally open about the family’s history. However, all late teenagers and young grown-ups should make a halt in their family’s expected development of them. They should absolutely scrutinize their upbringing, their feelings towards mother and father, even grandparents, uncles and aunts.

       A young couple with their baby, talking about the mother’s parents.

Above all teenagers or young grown-up should analyze their feelings toward themselves, – their very own self. -Why do I hate myself when such and such happens? Why do I fear that and that? Why am I always so low-keyed after family Sunday dinner with my parents? Why am I always exhausted and not relieved after talking to mother on the phone? Why does father always make me angry? And why do I feel so unworthy when I visit my grandparents, and sometimes even wish I was dead?

An example of non-comminicated pain in a family

I once had a patient that was a very intelligent and creative young artist. He often had severe tantrums at breakfast with his sweetheart. These episodes scared him, and made him very sad. Not for long, however, he was usually very smiling, full of joking and he had a kind of seductive social approach. But he often lost concentration and derailed in his artistic and practical life. This he wanted help with, both to understand what it was,  and how to get out of it, and back on his own track-again.

 Physical acting-out in a young grown up

He once told me of his childhood in another culture, where his parents were diplomats. It was first on his journey back to this foreign country that he got a terrible anxiety ridden flashback of seduction and rape from his childhood when he was ten years old. He also felt a deep and sad loneliness after this incident, and this loneliness followed him even after he returned to his native country.

 After the abuse

Protecting the parents that did not protect the child.

Every day his mother rung him on his cellphone, and talked about everything and nothing. I asked him what his parents thought of the serious abuse when he was a child, and was threatened with death if he did not submit to the abuser’s cravings. He answered with shrugging his shoulder. No, no, father would absolutely not understand and would blame him instead, and mother would be so desperate and angry, that he had to deal with her bad consciousness for years.

Then you have carried the guilt and responsibility of your parents on your own small shoulders since you were ten, I replied. And what about your younger sister. – I guess she was abused herself, he said. We never talk about it, because she is too deep down in drug addiction and depth, even with the police on her heels. But in some way I have failed her, he continued. She’s my little sister and I should have protected her when mother and father had too much work to attend to.

Crucial questions to ask oneself.

Both these young persons had drug issues, and deep traumas. More important is it to ask. What made their parents ignore them in their new lives in a totally different country? And why were these two children reluctant to tell their parents what happened when they were 7 and 10 years old?

To be partially blind of one’s own children is not unusual! But it has it’s origin in the family’s subconscious fabric of repression, denial and feelings of deep guilt and shame. For what? we might ask.

For what in the parents’ lives did these children had to sacrifice their childhood and young grown up lives? There are even much more serious examples of children covering their parents, and keeping up family appearances and myths. These must wait until they fit in in another post on the subject of subtle family brainwashing.

Most often brainwashing happens in regards to religion, political stance, occupational choice and attitudes to others and self. (And of course traditional brainwashing happens in kidnapping dramas with victims in captivity, which is not the topic here). )

These above mentioned entrenched ways of viewing the world and its inhabitants, even life itself, might sometimes be very constructive. But far more often these invisible indoctrinations make the children biased, and in some ways hinder them to see the world and people around them as they are and with fresh eyes.

Blind spots and black emotional holes

Very often it hinders the children to see their real capacity, or drawbacks. In that way it produces false consciousness and false or very skewed perception of the world and the family they live in. Instead of being a new and fresh up to date member of a developing family, the children end up being copies or blueprints of their parents with some new add-ons on the surface.

Most often this outcome is not revealed before the children get married and end up in the same roles and attitudes as their parents. Ironically enough they might perhaps once have revolted against this in their youth. That is of course if any kind of opposition in their family was not already smothered in its early birth.

If you  carry a heavy burden on your shoulders and really don’t know how it ended there, please make a halt and start to reflect. Then look carefully into your psychosocial baggage and ask yourself: Where does all this come from? Is this something my parents have given me? Is this something I have learned from them, directly or indirectly. Or is this me, -my unique self?

Sorting out objects and issues from “your personal and familial luggage of life” is absolutely essential in order to get yourself your own life.

And if you recognize this and that as yours, please ask if it is a strategy for emotional survival in your family, or just an expression of your true self. Then the next stage in this sorting out of your luggage, or rucksack, is to ask yourself what to throw away that belongs to your parents or the past, and what to keep as very useful for your present life and future.

This is an extremely difficult job, but it is the most important job you can do in your life. By this activity you can rid yourself of the blind spots that would most likely carry you into the same unsatisfying relations or critical situations that your parents have ended up in.

Opening up the “family rucksack”  hanging on your back

By this work on your family’s history and your own experiences, you would also most likely be able to rid yourself of the emotional and behavioral chains that have nothing to do with you and your acts in life, but on the contrary belongs to your ancestors.  By this sorting out of your rucksack you would also most likely stop dropping blind spots, black holes or psychological pain on your own children when they enter the  scene.

Many of us need something like a coach, councellor, psychologist or a liberational group to manage this hard work. Its hard because the things we want to scrutinize and get rid of has already been a part of us. Mother father and the small or big family system around us, have been internalized, as we call it in Academic Psychology. Your own self is also a part of the wider and deeper “family self”, as my psychologist teacher and advisor Løvlie Schibbye has written about from her  Scientific Research. (“Relasjoner” Løvlie Schibbye 2002,2009)

Often the main entrance to demasquing family myth, family lies, and hidden “ghosts”, is through the  surfacing of different physical and emotional  symtoms. These can vary from unexplainable anxiety, sudden or creeping depression, outbursts of anger to all kinds of somatic pain in your body. Then you’d better take it seriously as a signal to stop and check it out.! Even go to the doctor or a psychologist for an evaluation of the cause of the symptoms.

    A group of women feeling like newborn, after getting rid of obsolite attitudes and behavior socially inherited from their families.

     At best, a wonderful feeling of freedom after an emptying out the family  garbage.( here a rather too idealistic photo of a such a breakthrough)

Managing to live one’s own life

And most important of all, you will be born anew, as an independent, autonomous, and open minded person, in no need of projecting forbidden fragments of your untold family history on others, they being white, black, latinos, asians, muslims, christians or jews. Or just ordinary neighbors in your own street. Instead of being brainwashed into false consciousness of yourself, others and the world, you have now cleaned up mentally and can start afresh with the choices and challenges that life might bring to most of us.

At this point in your life you have also probably unveiled the fact that our society and political system has more or less deliberately used the institution of your family  to get acess to your brain and psychology. This trickle down brainwashing  only to impode yourself with the values,attitudes and actions expected by a citizen in your country.

This simple trickle down mechanism by our society’s institutions is necessary to make good citizens. But to make good societies, every man and woman must ask themselves; – is this really the right way to think, act and live our lives in this country? If the answer is yes, then you are lucky! If not you have to engage yourself in politics or at least vote when you can.

There will always be somebody or a group of people that are enpowered and enriched by keeping you brainwashed. I only want to remind you of this,  and hope you can  live up to the fantastic possibilities that your universally unique brain has given you!

   Launching  your new and better Journey of life, (here with a rather too American and Hollywood like photographical bias)

https://youtu.be/GIQn8pab8Vc