When Galileo Galilei in 1613
presented mathematical proof for the Copernican theory that the
earth revolved around the sun and not the opposite, it was
theological heresy and therefore labeled by the Church as
"philosophically false and absurd". Galileo was forced
to recant his statement and became blind as a result. Almost three
hundred years later the Church finally decided to give up its
illusion and remove his writings from the Index.
Today we find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the
Church in Galileo's time, but for us today much more hangs in the
balance. Our decision for either Truth or Illusion will have more
weighty consequences for the survival of humanity than was the
case in the seventeenth century.
It has been scientifically proven in the last few years that
the devastating results of the traumatizing of children are
inescapably thrown back onto society. This knowledge concerns
every single person and must - if spread sufficiently - direct
basic changes in our society, especially the stopping of the blind
escalation of violence.
The following points will attempt to clarify what is meant
here:
1. Every child comes into the world in order to grow, to
develop himself, to live, to love, and to articulate his needs and
his feeling for self-preservation.
2. In order to be able to develop themselves, children
need the help of adults who are aware of their needs, who protect
them, respect them, take them seriously, love them, and honestly
help them to orient themselves.
3. When these vital needs of the child are frustrated
and the child, instead, is abused for the needs of the adult -
beaten, punished, maltreated, manipulated, neglected, or betrayed,
without the interference of a witness - then the integrity of the
child will suffer a lifelong hurt.
4. The normal reaction to hurt should be anger and pain.
However, that anger remains forbidden to the child in a hurtful
environment, and the pain would be unbearable in a child's
loneliness. The child must then suppress his feelings, repress the
memory of the trauma, and idealize his aggressor. He does not know
later what has happened to him.
5. Disconnected from their original cause, feelings of
anger, helplessness, confusion, longing, distress, anxiety, and
pain force destructive actions against others (criminal behavior
or mass murder) or against oneself (drug addiction, prostitution,
psychic disorders and suicide).
6. The victims of the aggressors' vengeance are often
their own children, used as scapegoats. Their persecution in our
society is still legitimate, even held in high esteem, so long as
we define it as education. Tragically, parents beat their own
children in order not to feel what their own parents had done to
them.
7. An abused child will not become either a criminal or
mentally ill if at least once in his life he meets a person who
clearly realizes that it is not the beaten, helpless child, but
his environment which is crazy. To this extent, the knowledge or
ignorance of society (in the person of relatives, social workers,
therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials, nurses)
can save or help to destroy life.
8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed
the victim. We have been assisted in our blindness by theories,
conforming to the educational patterns of our great-grandparents,
in which children were seen as creatures ruled by meanness and
destructive drives, inventing deceitful and fanciful events, and
offending or desiring sexually their innocent parents. In truth,
each child tends to take the blame and responsibility for the
cruelty of his parents due to his constant love for them.
9. Thanks to the use of new therapeutic methods, we are
now able empirically to verify that all the repressed traumatic
experiences of childhood are stored up and they affect one
unconsciously for one's whole life.
10. In the light of this newly achieved knowledge, every
absurd behavior reveals its logic as soon as childhood traumatic
experiences no longer remain in darkness.
11. The increase in our sensitivity to the generally
denied cruelty in childhood and its effects will bring to an end
the violence passed on from generation to generation.
12. People whose integrity in childhood has not been
hurt, who received from their parents protection, respect, and
honesty, will be, in their youth and later, intelligent, sensible,
empathic, and highly sensitive. They will have a joy of living and
will feel no need to harm another person or themselves nor to
commit murder. They will need their strength to protect themselves
but not to attack others. They would not be able to do otherwise
than to respect and protect those weaker, and thus their own
children, because they have experienced exactly this and because
exactly this knowledge and not cruelty is stored up in them.
