Parenting techniques

I am not a parent. So many people would no doubt say that I have therefore no authority to comment on parenting, as it’s all very different when you have your own child. But I don’t care about that.

At times my parents tried to use various techniques on me, some gave them more power over me, some less. They all helped to fuck me up more.

As I read the latest techniques going around I know it will be the same for those parents using them, some will feel the techniques are helping them with their children, some not, and all will be helping to further fuck up their children.

What I do want to point out is that if any sort of technique or controlling discipline is required, then the parent has already gone way too far over the line. Their child is already way too fucked up. And the parents are way too fucked up from their early childhood being in a position to even consider using such things.

The whole idea of ‘good parenting’, using endless tips and tools, endless suggestions, endless ways to try and get what you want being the parent, only reflects all I am talking about in my posts: that we don’t love our children truly, that we only parent for control and power using our children to gain it, and all because we were made to feel so powerless by our parents. It all simply reflects the negative condition we’ve all had imposed, one way or another, on us.

Perfect loving parents will have no need to use a technique. They will simply parent with their feelings. And as their feelings will be a result of their living true, then they will always do perfectly what is needed ensuring their child will only ever feel fully loved by them.

To approach parenting from the point of view of having to work out the best or better ways of doing it with your mind is doing exactly what you’re parents have forced you to do – go against your feelings using your mind to control and dominate yourself and others. And this can only be self-rejecting, unfeeling and unloving, that which you are imposing on your child.

What I want to try and show is that the problem is much larger than trying to impose a couple of good helpful parenting techniques on your child all so you can get on and achieve all you believe is good in your life, all so you can have a more ‘loving’ and ‘harmonious’ relationship with your child. However, if this is what you want, then why not. But it’s not better parenting, it will still be fucking up your child, only in a different way. It will still be only adding to the damage already done, even if it seems like on the surface things are going along a lot smoother.

I want to point out that parenting as we know it is wrong, meaning it has an adverse and unloving affect upon the child. How we do ANY of it is wrong. And it’s all wrong because we’re doing it within self-denying negative states of being. And it’s this negative condition that we have to heal, and until we do, we’ll only be forever going around in circles, forever coming up with yet more ‘better’ ways to parent.

It happens all the time

The child is the innocent one.

And yet the child gets blamed for making the parent feel bad. But it’s the parent that is making the child feel bad that causes the child to react making the parent angry.

So the innocent child, often minding it’s own business, is made to feel bad. Naturally it reacts to this only to bring more anger, criticism and unlovingness down upon itself making it feel even worse.

It’s a vicious circle, and a bad pattern to have established within you. For when it does you can’t help yourself doing things to make someone angry with you all so you can keep feeling bad. It’s such a horrible and terrible feeling of powerlessness, to know you’re doing it, and to know you can’t stop doing it. That the negative attention is all you will get, it’s all you can get, and all because it’s all you did get.

Why would you want to be a therapist?

Because it’s a way you can gain power.

Everything we do in our negative orientated mind and will lives is to gain power, an attempt to re-gain the power our parents deprived us of naturally feeling and expressing as we grew up.

Our parenting is mostly all negative, yet we call it loving. So much of it had a negative unloving effect on us as seen by our having repressed childhood feelings – our childhood repression. And yet we call it all love.

In our unloving states as we grew up we felt powerless many times. Just look at how parents treat their children – does the child have equal power with the adult? No, the whole thing about being a child, so we seem to believe, is that the child is inferior and can’t nor shouldn’t have equal power. And so by treating our children this way we make them feel powerless, we’re always de-powering them, always pulling the rug out from under them. We might try and pump them up in other ways, trying to make them feel all-powerful and loved, but it’s all too late, and all on a condition of previous powerlessness.

And as children we don’t want to feel powerless. We do all we can to gain power within our family, some people being more successful at it than others. Yet it’s still all ONLY a subset of our parents all-powerful dominion.

And so all we do as adults is done to try and maintain our false-power within our powerless states, within our negative condition. And so those people who feel they can help others by being a therapist really see being a therapist as their means of having power, of trying to make up some of their childhood power deficit. And it’s acceptable. Being a therapist is ‘good’, so we all say, it’s a good way to try and re-gain power. Whereas being a murder is bad, that is unacceptable and not the ‘right’ way to re-gain power. And the therapist is held in high esteem, they can actually help others to shed some of their feelings of powerlessness possibly helping or enabling them to find new ways of re-gaining some of their lost and denied power.

So is it good to seek to gain power by using others to do so? Or is it that we’re happy, or at least pretend we are happy, with the trade off. We allow the therapist to use us because we believe and feel we are getting something out of it, something that will eventually and hopefully make us feel more powerful and better about ourselves? And so, is it right that therapists say you must not attempt to do your childhood repression healing without their help, and if you do… look out, all manner of bad things might happen to you.

And yet don’t misunderstand me, I only want to point out the truth of such things as I have come to see them. And I also understand that within our fuckedness we do need help, and help from those who may be using us to gain power. But that’s how it is within the negative – it can’t be any other way. But in time as you progress in your feeling-healing, the truth will come and along with it your own feelings of power – true power. And so your need to be dependant on such help from anyone else will diminish, to one day, end, the day when your childhood repression healing is over and you no longer feel powerless and under the regime of your parents. And what a great day that will be!

Love?

As I have said, I grew up believing I was loved by my parents. And I believed I loved them. And with my brother and sister we all lived in a relatively happy family. Yet my childhood repression has shown me otherwise. It has shown me through my buried early feeling-memories from my early childhood that this wasn’t the case, that there wasn’t any real or true love, it was all a fabricated ‘love’ based mostly on words and a desperate need to believe it was love.

On this blog and in my other writings on my Childhood Repression web site, I want to bring into question – love: is it real and true that which we call and even feel to be love? I want to aim for the bottom line, that being that it’s not love – that nothing we say or call love is real or true love. That it is all just something we’ve made up in and with our minds. And that it can’t be real, pure and true love because we are not living real, pure and true lives. We are not perfect, being imperfect as seen by the fact that we all have repressed early childhood feelings buried deep within us, all of which effectively taint that which we call love.

Generally, if I were make a gross generalised statement, I would say that if one feels wanted, accepted and involved within in one parents lives whilst growing up, then one will feel loved and so love them. And one will feel reasonably secure, confident and self-assured. And if one doesn’t feel wanted, accepted or involved, then one grows up feeling insecure, unconfident and scared of most things. And so if life works for you, as another gross generalisation, it will be because you had a good and loving relationship with your parents during your forming years, and if it doesn’t work, then you didn’t.

And what I want to highlight is the fact that this so-called love may not be what it is. I want to question it, to put the spotlight on it, and I want to know if it is genuinely real and true or if it is not.

And it will take people doing their childhood repression healing, completely healing their negative self-denying state of mind and will, to uncover the truth within themselves as to whether all they feel and believe to be love is love. For if it is true, real and pure then it will hold up through the healing scrutiny of suppressed bad feelings surfacing as they are allowed to. And if it doesn’t hold up, it will prove to be false and untrue.

I firmly believe we all live self-created fantasies, some people more happy about what they achieve than others. And all ‘love’ within them is false. Certainly within our feeling-denying negative states we can feel good and bad, perhaps even ‘loved’, but it’s still all within the negative, so ultimately none of it is real and true.

And I believe that until we accept this, and want to scrutinised all that we call love, we’ll never feel truly happy, and life will go on as it has with countless numbers of us wondering why we’re not happy and don’t feel loved. With the answer being what we dare not face – that we’re NOT loved and AREN’T happy, because we NEVER were.

Yelling at your child – again!

Your child makes you angry – again! The anger rushes up in you. It’s a wild force, too strong, too overwhelming to be controlled. It surges up in you and what can you do with it other than deliver it like a full punch to your child – to the offending person. In your rage and fury you want to kill it, not just stop it, but blast it off the face of the earth, wipe it out, get rid of it completely. It’s no longer your sweet little child whom you ‘love’ so much, it’s all your fear being slammed in your face and your anger rushes up trying to protect yourself from the evil monster that is threatening your life. So you bash into your child. It may only be verbally, it may also be physically, but you want to smash it down, crunch it, quickly bringing it back under your control.

For deeply buried reasons that you are not aware of your child has pushed all your warning buttons, you react ‘not being yourself’ as your power is being threatened. You don’t want to loose your power because to feel so powerless means you feel all those terrible bad feelings you dread, all those shocking feelings you felt when your parents did exactly what you are now doing to your child, all of which you have forced yourself to forget, bury and deny.

So your little child has become you and you are now back with your parent who is yelling and abusing you, repeating the same unloving pattern – yet again. And you are helplessly trapped in it. You have crossed the line, left yourself, denying your own bad feelings, all to stop the other person from making you feel bad. You want to stop them making you feel bad by crunching them because you don’t know what else to do – and how can you as there never was another way, your parents only ever treated you this way, just as they themselves were only ever treated by their parents.

But in crossing the line, not only are you hurting your own precious little child, you are also hurting your own precious self. You are blatantly disregarding your feelings – your bad feelings, all the fear that is giving rise to your anger. You are disregarding yourself just as you are disregarding your own child. In the blaze of anger no ones feelings can be regarded, all goes to shit, all needing to be destroyed.

There is no staying on your side of the fence and accepting and speaking about all the bad feelings your child is making your feel. Allowing yourself to be sympathetic to yourself, to all you are feeling, even including your anger. You are dismissing and denying yourself with the only result being to abuse your child. You are a child-abuser and in that very moment the worst kind because your child is going to develop those very same patterns of self- and feeling-denial that you have developed from your own parents. You are killing them, only not so much physically, but you are preventing them from freely expressing their emerging personality – so your anger is doing what you want with it, you are getting your way, yet in ways you are not readily aware of. And if your child actually stops what it’s doing and takes notice of you then that’s an added bonus, you can retain your power and control.

And in this state you still need an outlet, but one that is not your child. And that outlet is with your partner, with someone you can yell and express all your anger to and speak about how bad your feelings are making you feel – how bad your child is making you feel. Your rage needs to be vented but not on the innocent one, you need to stay on your side and vent to someone, another adult, who can cope with it – a friend, someone who will understand and be the kind, caring, sympathetic parent you didn’t have. Someone who will listen to you and take you seriously. Someone who won’t judge you or tell you what to do or make you stop. Someone with whom you can just go for it with allowing yourself to finally say all those horrible things you’ve wanted to say back to your own unloving, uncaring parents. And if you can’t do it in the moment with your partner, then when you can. Put yourself back in your bad feelings, allow your rage to be ignited again, and go for it.

There is always another way, but that way is hard, if not impossible, to see because we are rendered blind by our parenting and resulting patterns. But the way is still there, and it can be found were you to want to seek the truth of yourself, doing your feeling-healing and stop denying your bad feelings. And when it is revealed then surprisingly you may find that your relationship with your child changes, and so much so, that it won’t even do what was pushing your buttons because there is no need for it to do so anymore as you no longer have such buttons within you to be pushed.

As parents are the leaders, as you change, so too will your child. With your child being there to help you uncover and reveal the truth of yourself. The child whilst it’s forming is somewhat like nature, but even more so, there to reflect back to you exactly as you are. So if your child is making your angry, it’s not actually your child that is making you angry, it’s really yourself, you’re doing it all to yourself, with your child lovingly and selflessly showing – reflecting – back to you this aspect of yourself you are not paying attention to. And instead of being ever so grateful for it lovingly helping you, you erupt unconsciously with your anger, crunching down hard on it blaming it for being the evil one. When the sad truth is – you are the Evil One, not your innocent little blameless child.

IT’S MY TURN NOW!

I had to obey my parents – NOW YOU HAVE TO OBEY ME! And you just have to, because I say. I don’t need a reason, I don’t need to justify it, I don’t need to tell you why – YOU JUST DO! You do because I say so – AND THAT IS ENOUGH! I am the parent now, you are not, you are the child – I HAVE THE POWER. You do not.

When I was a child they had power over me. They made me feel powerless. I was powerless. I had no say – no say in my own life. They had all the say and I had to obey. The were BIG, I was small, and that was enough. What could I do? Nothing. And I hated it. I hated them. I hated how they treated me – their own child.

And I wanted to smash them. I wanted to scream and yell and make them stop. I tried but it did me no good. But I still wanted to and still do want to even though I had to bury and repress such bad feelings. I want to rage. I want to tell them how much they have hurt me. I want to tell them how much I feel unloved by them – my own parents.

I want to smash my anger and rage all over them, but I can’t. So what can I do with it all? I look around to dump it on someone else. Someone lesser than I. And I find that person – my own child. And I breathe a sigh of relief as finally, FINALLY, there is someone I have power over. Finally I can make someone do what I want. Finally I can make them be how I want them to be. Finally I am BIG and they are small. And they don’t get a say. They can protest and try to resist all they want but it won’t get them anywhere. Because I am the strong one and they are weak. They loose; I win. And I feel good. I can even say to them: I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THE WORLD. And they can’t say anything other than they love me too more than anything in the world, because if they don’t say it, I’ll smash them. And they know it. I’ve done it plenty of times before.

My parents made me feel bad, so I want to make someone or something else feel bad, even if I do it in my imagination. I can’t make them feel bad, I am too powerless with them to do that – they had all the power. But I can make someone or something else that is not them feel bad. And that is how it is meant to be – isn’t it? Isn’t it what they taught me? Isn’t it how we are meant to live our lives? When it’s our turn, when we’ve grown up, then we can be the boss, then we can do all we want, then no one can tell us NO! STOP THAT! and stop us. Then we are free. And we all want to be free – RIGHT!

Free to finally make another person or creature feel bad. And it’s so easy to do. Just have a child, it couldn’t be easier…

Be responsible for your own feelings.

The parent is full of repressed childhood feelings. The child pushes its parents buttons making the parent feel bad. The parent feels all sorts of bad feelings most of which it denies and won’t allow itself to feel. So what does it do? Instead of allowing itself to feel bad, it comes down hard on its child, making its child stop doing what it’s doing, all so it will no longer feel bad.

The child makes the parent feel bad so then the parent crunches it. The parent lies to its child saying all sorts of meaningless things telling its child why it can’t be as it wants to be.

The child doesn’t understand its parents deceitful behaviour and only feels worse, the parent causing its own child’s bad feelings.

The parent doesn’t live responsibly with its own feelings – staying true to them, expressing them and seeking the truth of them.

And we say to our child ‘I love you’. And we make our child believe it is loved, that it lives in a loving family, when all around it is lies.

The parent lies to its child because it’s lying to itself – about how bad it feels.

The whole parent/child relationship is fucked. It’s no good, no matter how ‘loving’ the parent might be. It’s fucked because no one is being or allow to be true. No one in it is freely expressing all the feelings they feel.

And one day perhaps we’ll allow ourselves to admit, accept and then speak about this truth. One day the parent will be able to stay on its side, allowing itself to feel bad and not taking its fear and denial of its bad feelings out on its own child.

One day… maybe…

The creatures aren’t mean to their offspring, so why are we?

Mum and dad Cape Barren Goose stand together in the field near the dam with their six cute little fluff-ball chicks pecking around under and between them.

It’s such a lovely sight seeing how caring, how lovingly devoted the parents are to their little ones. As soon as anything threatens, father goose is off wings raised chasing away the intruder. Mother goose spreads her wings sitting down and all six chicks somehow manage to squeeze in under her all warm and safe in her soft feathery down.

Why is it that nature cares so well for it’s young, it supposedly being ‘inferior’ to us, and yet we ‘great ones’ yell, hit, criticise, chastise, correct, abuse, beat down to nothing, our children? Why as parents are we always interfering with our children, always telling them what they can and can’t do – always dominating and controlling them?

Why are we so mean and nasty to our children?

Why aren’t we as devoted, gentle, kind, caring, respectful and considerate of our children as the parent Geese are? The Geese parents don’t interfere with their chicks, they never tell them what they can and can’t do. Nature is unconditional in its love whereas we are conditional – why?

Why is it that we insist on living in a world that is anti-children, anti-nature, not basing everything we do around the weaker ones? Not putting the weaker, ‘lesser’, ones first?

Why is it that we say we love each other, that our children are the most precious things to us, and yet all we do is abuse and traumatise them treating them like shit?

Why is it that I hear little children so often crying, when I never hear the little baby chicks crying?

Why is it we are so wrong, living so far away from the truth of ourselves?

And why is it that we refuse to see how horribly unloving we are?

Why weren’t my mum and dad like the Geese mum and dad? Why didn’t they completely love me so I could grow up being as loving as they were, able to love my children like those little dark-stripped chicks will grow up to do?

Why don’t we get it, still after all these countless numbers of generations? What is wrong with our superior brains?

How can you love when you feel unloved?

You can’t. You can pretend you are loving, but it’s a lie.

If you feel unloved the last thing you can do is love. How can you when all you feel is that you want to be loved. You need love. You need it to make yourself feel good. You don’t feel loved, you don’t have love to give. If you are made to give something you don’t have; or if you believe you should give something you don’t have, you can only feel worse. How can you give something you don’t have? And how will trying to do that make you or the other person feel good and loved?

You grew up feeling unloved. You still ache within you to feel and be loved. You want to be loved more than anything. You do all sorts of things, have all sorts of relationships, trying to get love. You live in love deficit, it’s burning gaping hole deep within you, and you yearn to have it filled. Then you have children. But it’s not so you can give all your love to your children, it’s so you can take all the love your children are giving you. You have children to try and fulfil your love deficit. You can’t give them love, you don’t have any to give. You pretend you love them, pretend you give them love, but it’s all to hide your taking of their love from them. You desperately need love, and children, whilst they are young, are founts of it – that is, until having received no love from their love-denying parents and they too run of love to give.

You bring your children into the world to use them. To milk them of their love. And when they don’t give it, you feel very upset and angry with them, beating and yelling them into submission, so they will keep being how you want them to be; so they will keep giving you their love.

You as a parent are nothing more than a love-leech living off the love of your own children.

And then your children grow up and wonder why they feel so bad; why they feel so unloved. They look around desperately in their lives, just as you did, trying to get love from all sorts of things, nature and other people, all which fails to satisfy their great love need. Just as you feel unsatisfied in love.

And your children have their own children. And finally, for a few years at least, love is again readily available – unconditional and on tap. Love in the form of a pure, sweet, innocent giving child is freely flowing asking nothing of you. But then the well starts to dry up. Then what do you do? Then all you can do is pretend like hell; do what you’ve always done – pretend that you all live in a ‘loving and happy’ family.

And you wait… possibly the well might fill up again… when the great-grandchildren come.

Alice Miller

Alice Miller

If you are new to understanding about childhood repression then I highly suggest reading Alice Millers books. (see link to a free book over there on the right – For Your Own Good)  And her website

Alice Miller is a psychologist focusing in child abuse and mistreatment.

Thank you Alice for all the help you’ve given Marion and I.