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In the words of Alice Miller

— Articulating the child’s authentic voice —

from

Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-Six Watercolors and an Essay by Alice Miller

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“Only when I make room for the voice of the child within me do I feel myself to be truly genuine and creative.  I use every means now at my disposal…to help this child to find the appropriate way of expressing herself and to be understood.”  (Page 17)

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“Those who take a stand in today’s world on behalf of workers, women, or even mistreated animals will find a group to represent them, but someone who becomes a strong advocate for the child and opposes the lies society has tolerated in the guise of child-rearing practices will stand alone.  This situation is difficult to understand, especially when we consider that we were once all children ourselves.  I can explain it only by suggesting that unequivocal advocacy of the child represents a threat to most adults.  For when it becomes possible for children to speak out and confront us with their experiences, which were once ours as well, we become painfully aware of the loss of our own powers of perception, our sensibilities, feelings, and memories.  Only if the child is forced to be silent are we able to deny our pain, and we can again believe what we were told a children:  that it was necessary, valuable, and right for us to make the emotional sacrifices demanded of us in the name of traditional child-rearing.  As a consequence of the adult’s arrogant attitude toward the child’s feelings, the child is trained to be accommodating, but his or her true voice is silenced.  Another arrogant and blind adult is the result.

Is it not senseless, then, to let children speak, to help them to become articulate in an arrogant adult world as long as there is so little hope of their being listened to by adults and when the danger exists that their authentic voice will be silenced as soon as it it heard?  I do not believe it is senseless; it is essential to let their voices, the voices of those who have been afflicted by silence, speak if we hope to prevent the total disappearance of the springs of knowledge and creativity concealed in every childhood.  In this regard, the published reports by former victims of child abuse will be particularly beneficial in exposing the distortion of the truth so widespread in many areas of our life.”  (pages 18-19)

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JUST FOR FUN – LISTEN HERE

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In my own words:

Blasphemy!  I do not have a “child within me.”  There is only ME within ME.  I am today totally the full sum of every experience I have ever had.  The memory I have of them, consciously or not, and the impact they had on me are all contained within this body that is ME — right here, right now.

Because I have suffered from dissociation since I was born into a malevolent world of abuse, chaos and madness, I cannot afford to pretend there are any more stray parts of me floating around ‘somewhere’ than there already — legitimately — are.  And there certainly isn’t ‘one in there’ I would ever care to name ‘the child within me’.  How silly is that idea?

I believe we do ourselves a great disservice in suggesting that we have some ‘alien’ life force or form within us that we might even begin to think about as our ‘child within’.  We have all integrated our experiences since conception into our bodies, including our brain.  What is the purpose of denying this fact?

If cohesiveness and coherency are the goal that any of us with less than an optimal safe and secure infancy-childhood might be aiming toward, what good does it do us to pretend that some magical, mysterious part of us is supposedly missing from the action of our living, breathing body at exactly this present moment in time?

Not only does the concept of an ‘inner child’ or a ‘child within’ feel demeaning, disrespectful and dishonoring of who I AM as a person no matter what hell I have survived in my lifetime, it also seems blatantly ridiculous.  It’s just too Twilight Zonish for me.  It’s too Alice in Wonderlandish, too Through the Looking Glass weird to me.  I spent the first 18 years of my life in the Twilight Zone.  I don’t need another split second of it now.  No way.

Let those with the luxury to afford to buy this myth — well, buy it.  Not gonna be me….  I work hard to give myself permission to be the whole of who I am, the one who has followed THIS life path from the moment of my conception to this instant in time — there is no possible way I left any part of myself behind, and I know it.  I am.  I am, most grandly, wholly ME — even if the whole of me exists as a thousand dissociated parts, they are MY ADULT parts.

The great thing is to find moments I can actually have fun being ALL OF ME!

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*Age 58 – October 28, 2009 – Dollar store paint, crayon and marker images

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