Bradshaw On: The Family. Part 1 - The Family in Crisis

[Music] so [Music] do [Music] there's a late 19th century french novelist named leon blah who wrote a book called a woman who was poor and one of the statements he made in that book was or one of the statements he is quoted as made having made in his life is that there's only one sorrow the sorrow of not being a saint now the context in which he said that didn't have anything to do with people with halos or people who were so holy that they're not somebody we could we could we could attempt to strive to be like in our lives uh what what the context of that statement was is the sorrow is that people miss the mark that they're not whole holiness is wholeness that you don't become the person you were meant to be that you go through your life you're born you go through your life and you die and you never become the person that you were meant to be but of all the people who have ever lived you're the only one like you the poet says what i do is me for that i came that i came i came into this world to be me and so the question is who am i and as you listen to this series and as you listen to me tonight that's the question i want to focus on for you throughout the series because i think that is the crisis in the family today that people have lost a sense of themselves that we have what i would consider the universal human problem a wrong perception of ourselves in one sense that's the only problem in all the years of counseling that i've done that's the problem that emerges over and over again a wrong belief about ourselves people have a wrong belief about themselves and out of that wrong belief comes wrong choosing the choices i make in my life depend on the belief i have for example your belief about the world uh will condition how you react to the world i tell the little story of my friend who picked me up at christmas to go shopping and his father was with him and then my friend is just his wonderful happy guy and his father hates the world his father believes that people are no dang good so my friend drove houston traffic during the holidays took about 20 minutes to get to the galleria almost unheard of he's smiling at people and they're letting him in traffic we get through with our shopping couple hours later the father says let me drive gets to the wheel of the car i'm talking to my friend i don't even notice 20 minutes later we're not out of the galileo parking lot and i look over at this guy's face and he's just glaring at people and pretty soon a sweet little lady lets us in and he calls her a dumbbell and you see what i began to realize here this guy creates the kind of world he believes is out there he believes the world is no good he creates that world by his whole attitude and even when there's data to the contrary that the world is nice he discounts it because it doesn't fit his belief system his map of the world so whatever you believe about yourself is going to be the map you use to make every decision about your life that's the crucial question what is it that i believe about myself now i don't mean that i can look in the mirror and know i have a good job or know that people like to hear me lecture that isn't what i'm talking about i'm talking about the core the core kinesthetic the deep feelings about yourself what will i show you about me you see the more i believe i'm okay then the more spontaneous and unguarded i will be i don't have to hide myself from you i lived my life a great deal of the time addicted to my own shame my own belief that i wasn't okay so i wouldn't show anybody a lot about me there's still parts i won't show some of them are appropriate some of them are not so appropriate but i was literally controlled in my life by my shame shame is to be guarded about being unguarded that makes any sense you're not going to let go you're not going to be spontaneous you're going to miss the mark if the deepest part of you believes you're not okay so shame is the crisis in the family everything i'm going to show you in this series will go back to this core belief in people that they're worthless that they really are not okay that they're flawed that somebody's gonna find out if they expose that is that they really trust and show themselves that to me is the deepest human problem this loss of our self this loss if you will of the image of god in us that we don't believe in now the whole issue of that belief about myself or that shame instead of that self-love and that self-worth has to do with how i learned about myself it has to do with how i learned about myself and how i learned about myself was in a family how i came to know what i could feel about myself what others felt about me happened to me in a context now it isn't that that family what happened that family can never be changed it can be changed but it has a lasting impact on my life the rules that i grew up with the set of rules that i took on internally and came to use to manage my life were learned in a family so so the whole issue of shame of people acting out of shame now let me talk about some of the ills of our time and let me tell you right off that we have a lot of denial about this we have a great deal of denial about it if i start saying that 60 million americans are seriously affected by alcoholism that's one quarter of our population 60 percent of the women in this culture are overweight probably into some kind of eating disorder fifty percent of the males are overweight that is in an unhealthy bodily state many don't even know about their bodies because they're so dissociated from them so we drink and we put pills and we put caffeine see we put all these things in our body in order to be able to feel our bodies shame-based people have to do that because the core of shame is so deep you see my shame governed my life for years and years and years that is it control what i would show you about me but listen to this it controlled what i would look at finally about me as i begin to to sort of plan around my shame and compulsively act out of my shame i get to the point i don't even look at me and you see the great danger in that the unexamined life that you don't even know yourself because you're so busy covering up the deep feelings of inadequacy or unworthiness so so it's terribly important to see that the diseases of our day what we eat the eating disorders we have at least four kinds of serious emotional problems that are called eating disorders compulsive eating bulimia anorexia fat thin we'll talk about that later on when i talk about compulsivity the fat thin disorder where you obsess all the time about weight am i going to eat i shouldn't have eaten that doughnut but i ate the doughnut but i don't want to go there because maybe i'll eat a donut drive yourself crazy with this obsessive mental process about eating okay 34 million adult women walking around in our society were sexually abused that's the statistic that came out of the 1984 life magazine feature story on incest families 34 million adult women terry kellogg says one out of four women in this culture are sexually abused severely or mildly by age 13 by somebody over 18 and 80 percent know their offenders that's that's a horrible statistic 10 million people are the victims of violence in the family every year in the united states of america 10 million people in their own families are victims of violence now some of these overlap that is a lot of the violent people are also alcoholic or drug addict or some of those disorders overlap each other so so we need to be a little bit careful about statistics and statistics are like bikinis they reveal a lot but they hide vital spots uh somebody said so i don't want to go so far with statistics okay but and there are lots of other statistics nine out of 10 married men at some time in their life will have an affair they're having an affairs they've got to be having an affair with a woman so that means an awful lot of women are having affairs so so there's a tremendous amount of data now and then the divorce rate more than half the families are ending in divorce we have one of the most serious problems we've ever had in this culture of children running away from home when we do the studies on those runaway children what are we finding that they're getting knocked around violently abused or they're getting sexually abused or from alcoholic families or they're from compulsive addictive families so the diseases of lifestyle what we eat what we drink the medicines we use the stuff we use in the morning sleeping disorders stress insomnia is a huge disorder in this country sleeping pills uh tranquilizer sleeping is a huge disorder in this country our entertainment lots of people are addicted to entertainment they compulsively watch television or go to shows or cannot live unless there's something outside of them to make the inside feel less lonely have to have excitement or you have to have noise or you have to have something because you see the shame core once you go in there i just can't live in there it's too lonely it's too unfilled it's too unfull it's too empty so the diseases of our day are diseases of lifestyle they have to do with our lifestyle the way we work studies are showing that workaholism is one of the most serious compulsions going that workaholic families the kids will act out in those family as severely or more so as in alcoholic families that if dead is never there that that our mom is never there but more often dad because work is presented in our sex roles as a as the way to be successful because the way to be successful is to make money in our culture seeing money is worth and if you feel like you don't have any worth then money can compensate cars jewelry possessions can compensate for the sense of lost worth so this is the disease this is the sickness this compulsivity this compulsivity the very things that we eat the way we sleep the way we entertain ourselves the way we work alcoholism is probably the leading killer in this culture we don't say that we say something else but that's because a lot of people don't put on the on the death certificates the way that the person really died they died of uh going over a bridge uh how do you put that on the death certificate or cirrhosis of the liver or comp liver complications we might say and as we look at the range of disorders and the compulsivity that's what i like to focus on that out of that shame base another way to look at the crisis is to say that we're we're in a crisis of compulsivity and that compulsivity itself is set up in family systems that the initiation into compulsivity always takes place in families and the way it takes place is out of some form of abuse which in its initial sort of initiation was salvific that is i'm a workaholic because i can't deal with my feelings i don't have any feelings of tenderness or feelings of dealing with my children so i'd rather stay at work and be into the impersonal excitement of making money as opposed to the threatening intimacy of home and the getting close and the expressing feelings but what happened to a person like that very early on they got cut off from their feelings very early on they got abused in some way so that they were not allowed to be who they were if you look at this little chart over here uh this is a chart that really depicts some a theme that i'm going to be coming back to all through this series that if you think of of this bottom block as you or me at birth this is what we look like at birth there's a private self uh and a public self that is there's a part that i experience of me under my skin then there's a part of me that you experience or another way to say this is that this is the conform this is the conforming self the public self and this is the actualizing self this is the part of me that that has individualized this private self and this is the part of me that conforms uh for socialization if you will or to survive now by puberty if you come out of what i'm going to consider normal kind of sexual scripting see which is already abusive if you just come out of normalcy in our culture although we're making changes and we're we're trying to become conscious of this but you see a little girl is born here's her private self suddenly she laughs too loud and somebody says don't act like that you stop gurgling when you laugh that's not ladylike so this private self goes in and this public self gets bigger as she pretends not to gurgle when she laughs in order to please mother or please daddy or please whoever so constantly she's sacrificing her real self to this public self she has to give up who she is to fit the script that the culture decided on is what makes a real woman and it may not be like her at all it may be an act that she has to play in order to adapt to survive okay by puberty look at how big the public self is as opposed to the private self and let's say by mid life that that private self is just a tiny little part of you that most most of you or most of us or whoever it is is an act is a performance or somebody said by this point you've become a human doing and not a human being that your whole life is a performance and an act it's an achievement see very early on you go to school and you get grades and you achieve and they measure you and they judge you and if you don't beat the measurement of the judgment that private self which may be very different which may be you may hear a different drummer there's never been another you who are we going to measure you by see what i want you to get right now there's no such thing as normal because if somebody's normal they're the norm we've got to compare everybody to them if you step forward and say i am a normal person then every one of us have to be compared to you that you are the measure and the standard by which all of us are measured what i'd rather say is we miss the mark the sorrow of not being a saint is that you're not functional is that by the time you get here you're pretending like you're not angry when you're angry because that's dirty or that's not ladylike are you pretending not to be sad when you're sad because that's not manly and so part of you is frozen and split off and gone part of you is no longer functional your feelings or maybe way back here you were you were so uh you had such an authoritarian family struggle you were never allowed to think a thought if you said something somebody said that's stupid or that's crazy or where'd you get a crazy idea like that uh so so what you learned to do was to adapt you pretended like you didn't have any idea and pretty soon by the time you got to here you quit thinking you see if you never were allowed to have a will of your own how could you have any willpower how could you have any will to decide anything for yourself and by the end of this program i'm going to talk to you about the phenomena of nazi germany and hitler and how a hitler could happen and i'm going to tell you something that's terrifying any body that begins to understand the structure of families can manipulate any group of people because all you got to do is go in there and do them just like they were done in their families if you come out of autocratic authoritarian families where you march to obedience you've never been allowed to have your own feelings your own thoughts your own will you've always had to obey someone outside of yourself some kind of foreign management you were never allowed to have inner judgment inner kind of criticalness that was never allowed you you weren't allowed to have anger you weren't allowed to disagree you weren't allowed to be different then if you don't have somebody telling you what to do you're going to feel lost because your whole life has been geared to living from the outside and what a compulsivity is is a kind of dependency it's a dependency problem it doesn't matter whether it's alcohol or pills or marijuana or whatever or cigarette smoking it's a dependency so the loss of this self is the greatest tragedy this is the sorrow that leon bois talking about that people get here and they're not who they are in this one and only life and we did a play miller did a play in the united states to dramatize that a play called the death of a salesman where at willy lone low man's grave his son walked away and said he never knew who he was that's the crisis and the greatest sorrow it's not it's not a crisis if you don't make a bunch of money or achieve worldly prestige it's the crisis to have been born and go to your grave and never know who you are never know yourself that deep spontaneous integral part of you that there's never been anybody else like that's the crisis now i want to show you how that gets set up in families and i want to show you material that ron lang has said the material i'm getting ready to show you is to our previous theories of mental health and mental illness what freud was to theories of demonology where we had people anybody somebody was considered to be mad or insane we locked them up in dungeons or simply said they were possessed by the devil that the material i'm going to show you is brand new it's 38 40 years old really that is it's really coming to psychiatric parlance is known by the people in the profession [Music] very well but it is not known by the general public very much at all and i want to make this material available to people in this series because in my own personal life nothing has helped me more to understand the dysfunctional family system that i came from the multi-generational alcoholism my daddy was an alcoholic i was an alcoholic my grandmother was an alcoholic there's several generations of alcoholics to really come to understand what the sins of the fathers that are visited on the third and the fourth generation means and how awesome it is and that it's a lot more profound and scary than i ever knew that if you don't understand the context the family system from which you came you simply cannot understand how you're carrying that system right now and how you can be living out somebody else's life rather than your own and that to me is very scary to have gone you know to go to your death and never know what your one and only life was now a very beautiful artist has made us this mobile and this mobile is a work of art it is highly balanced and for this series i asked her to make something that would represent the systemic balance and unity of a work of art but i'm using it also to symbolize the systemic notion of the family that the family is a system and that's what we've really come to understand that it's a system and as a system it has its own systemic needs it has its own systemic needs that the persons in this system do the system is not really the sum total of five individual parts or seven individual parts the system is the interrelationship of all the parts such that if i touch that part every other part in this system is affected by the touching of that one part so so the whole notion of a family as a system is that fam a family is composed of interdependent parts that is every part is affecting every other part now let me say something very quickly what that means right off the bat is that we've got to move out of an old linear kind of thinking such as we would blame all the family problems on the fact that daddy was an alcoholic it becomes a cause effect blame game see my father indeed was an alcoholic but so was his mother and so was her father so who are we going to blame it on and i don't know any i you know i don't know any data three or four generations back but i got some big hunches that this has been going on for a long time and that basically it's not a blame game it's it's to begin to understand first of all how let's say if this represented my father how my father comes out of a system himself in which he was impacted by that system for example my father mother was alcoholic and she divorced his father who abandoned him and hit he had two stepfathers both of whom were alcoholics one of whom was violent and tried to kill him on several occasions happy memoirs back there okay so by the time my daddy marries my mother he's already carrying a couple of generations of dysfunctionality see again remember dysfunctionality means you're missing the mark not all the parts are functioning why is my daddy an alcoholic because like all compulsive disorders it's a cover-up for his feelings a compulsion or an addiction is a pathogenic relationship with a mood-altering event experience or thing that has harmful life-damaging consequences it's real easy to understand addiction uh to alcohol or cocaine or sex or blue bell cookies and cream ice cream because those things are highly euphoric and mood altering it's not easy to understand how vacuum cleaning can be an addiction and you might stay tuned for the weeks to come i hope i can remember to talk about vacuum cleaning or workaholic how does a workaholic mood alter he doesn't mood altar in the same way that an alcoholic does what he does is he distracts himself from his feelings by working all the time do you understand how that's mood altering okay so my father is carrying dysfunction what's the dysfunction he doesn't have his feelings available to him the only time my daddy can feel his feelings is when he's drunk okay when he drinks he can feel his feelings he becomes spontaneous he can be sad he can be angry he can be vitalized because very early on he in relationship to the system that he came out of became dysfunctional uh once that dysfunction takes place in the system everything in the system is stressed just like when i push that every part of it is moved here is my mother here here's my sister here am i here's my brother every single one of us are affected by that stress see because what does stress do every organism is geared to handle a little stress we all have the ability to handle stress so that we can when the stress comes you go into fight flight response and the heart beats faster and the blood comes out of the lower intestines goes into the legs into the brain so you can fight a run but what no one was ever intended to do was to live like that chronically to live like that all the time so what happens in this system is if this stressor remains then chronic stress takes over and everybody in that system have to adapt to that stress now do you see immediately how nobody else in that system can have their own reality no one else in the system can have their own reality because the stress is too great you're in survival all the time fighting for your life to survive this could also be a rage-a-holic father who screams and is violent knocks people around a rage-a-holic mother a mother who's screaming and worrying and emotionally battering people with her constant criticism this could be a sadaholic mama who's sick all the time hypochondriac mama who's addicted to the feeling of sickness that stresses the system then let's say that these two people are not so overtly dysfunctional they're just covertly dysfunctional they're both in a sex role she's one half he's one half they make a whole like they're supposed to although one half times one-half equals a fourth uh they they married and they're playing their roles it's saint mom and dad uh and they're always playing their roles and they never show any anger overtly it's all passive aggressive and by the time this kid gets to be uh 14 he's doing drugs heavily and so they say well we've got to do something for this boy let's send him to a program and so this boy goes to the program to get treatment and the treatment people say we want to see your mother and daddy too and the mother and daddy go well why all we want you to do is to fix him ah we don't have not we can't even believe he's doing this not our child we are upper middle class good people we go to church every sunday okay what this kid knows is that this is a dysfunctional relationship that they don't really get along they pretend all the time that she back i'm going to give you the vacuuming bit right now that she vacuumed 16 hours a day because she's enraged at this guy she's furious at him but has never once said it to him because if you're in love you're never supposed to express feelings and feelings are weak from her system so the way she avoids dealing with her anger is vacuuming 16 hours a day so she's addicted to vacuuming in order to distract herself from her rage which has to do with her husband so this kid becomes the identified patient and he goes into treatment now in the old treatment they would lock him up or put him in a drug ward or spend years trying to invalidate his disorder and never look at this mother and daddy or when you get to things like delinquency or you get to things like anorexia then those are those are kinds of disorders systemic disorders that uh were just buffaloing people until they really begin to get onto family systems when i do the programs on compulsivity i'll talk about anorexia and later on in the series i'll be talking about ways to intervene in these systems what i'm trying to tell you tonight is that that the a whole new notion of mental illness came out of the systemic notion that you have to look upon if anyone in the system is dysfunctional you look upon the whole system as dysfunctional that if this daddy is an alcoholic we're now talking about a chemically addicted family not just daddy the whole family is chemically addicted if daddy's a rage-a-holic he rages and controls everybody with his rage then that whole family is sick it's a whole violent family and everybody in that family is going to be affected by that in terms of their own reality in fact the law is that the more anxiety there is in the system the less anybody can have this private self over here individuation another way to think of the private self and the public self is individual togetherness the confirming self togetherness self and the individual self now the higher the anxiety the less anybody gets to be an individual the lower the anxiety see which would depend on this chief component mom and dad if that chief component has low level anxiety then the rest of the family gets to individuate healthy systems individuate in an orderly fashion or somebody said healthy families disintegrate in a heart orderly fashion that is everybody gets to go be an individual little little gertrude is going off and she wants to be a writer a journalist in europe and this one wants to make bobsleds and aspen and uh this one wants to be a lawyer or whatever that may not be anything like what daddy's doing see life goes forward not backwards but in dysfunctional systems there's going to be control and rigidity and every boy in this family has been a lawyer boy and uh you know we're not asking you to be but but there are very hidden pressures in the system so that you don't have your own reality you don't have your own reality see this system has components like mother and daddy are the chief component which is the interrelationship and it also has rules for example everyone in this system may be able to express uh no one in the system may be able to express anger but daddy the rule may be your father can get angry but no one else can so that none of these kids grow up functional because they don't have their anger available to them they either become passive aggressive rebels this one acts out by overeating because daddy hates fat and he controls everybody with his rage and anger and so this one weighs 400 pounds by the time she's 19 and and and daddy just doesn't know what to do about it but boy is she getting it you see how her passive aggressive instead of saying i'm sick of you trying to control everybody and make everybody in your image which is to make everybody number two because you think you're number one why would you want us all to be like you if you're number one that means we're all second best and what is this making us in your image i thought we were in god's image and i thought there was no one else like me and that life goes forward not backwards see no kid do you ever didn't y'all do that as a kid stand up and do what i just did so what happened to that feeling if you were being controlled and manipulated and formed in somebody's image and likeness what happened to it is you just swallowed it you just swallowed it because there wasn't any place to express it and that is what gets people in trouble is swallowing it it isn't the traumatic events of our life that gets us it's the inability to express it it's the inability to talk to anybody about it to share your sadness uh that your mother is battering you emotionally out of her nervousness and anxiety that she won't ever let you be who you are whatever you do it's never right no matter what you do there's something wrong with it see and so we just get chipped away chipped away chipped away until there's nothing left of you now if you think that isn't a crisis i don't know what a crisis is is that that this one and only life that i have that's all i have to offer is this one and only life and that by the time i'm 15 or 16 i don't have the foggiest notion who i am what i want you see because i'm so dissociated because i've had to adapt to survive and you see children figure out very early on that if they're going to survive around there they better please those giants and remember they are giants when you're when you're two years old they're five times your size and five times your weight for me that'd be somebody 17 foot eight inches tall who weighed 800 pounds now that's that's a you know that's a pretty scary phenomena 800 pound 17 foot nine inch tall person and boy if if i don't please them and i i don't i don't have anything i will die is what a child believes so these this whole systemic thing then and then the more dysfunctional this is then the more people live for the needs of the system the more functional it is the more the system lives for the needs of the people okay so let's say daddy's an alcoholic and he leaves what does the system need he's a husband there's no marriage so one of these boys is going to be the emotional husband will be very severely affected sexually by that will not have any of their needs met because they will be meeting their mother's needs or let's say daddy comes back and he realizes there is a very special relationship between little farquhar here in mama that that they are kind of confident so he may take little gwenevere to be his princess and suddenly you've got and this happens in dysfunctional families you'll have these inappropriate bondings daddy will pick one girl child mom will pick one boy child and then you've got all these triangles going murray bowen talks about triangles in these marriages and it becomes very confusing confused because everybody gets fused everybody gets fused and everybody gets confused now let's say there's no no morality in this family daddy's out drinking he's found with women messing around so when a kid becomes super moral because a system needs morality or let's say there's no religion in it one of them becomes super religious joins a christian cultic group or a hare krishna group or and comes home chanting beads all day while fighting's going on in the kitchen the fact see the system needs that suppose one of these kids wasn't wanted that child often become lost or what's called the lost child get lost we don't need another kid around here so the best way you can adapt to the system is just get lost now this kid will become perfect his child will become perfect they will go to their room not make any noise won't give anybody any trouble mama will say thank god for her because she doesn't give us any trouble do you begin to see how the system's needs start getting met that's a system has needs uh let's say daddy's lonely and needs a buddy so this son decides to be a drunk to hang around with him my dad and i literally met in a bar after 10 years and had big time together for several months before i sobered up and i i sobered up first and brought him into the program i was my mother's surrogate husband i was also my father's father they used to call him a block off the old ship so i grew up being my my father's parent now that is abusive folks anytime children come out of systems like that they're getting into abuse now i want you to hear something i'm not blaming them and i really want you to hear that one of the hardest things for all of us to understand is that the material that i'll be presenting you tonight in the next eight nine weeks is not not underscore blaming anybody what we're trying to do is present data knowledge that is pretty much known by all the therapists as we deal with diseased people to try to get people factual data about what happened to them because if you don't know the roles you were in you can't get out of them you've got to know what roles you're in because they function unconsciously i'm working with a guy right now he is the biggest rebel you've ever seen he anything he's in he attacks and i said here you are 65 years old you have been attacking institutions presidents political parties churches all your life and all you're doing is being loyal to the family because the family needed a rebel see the family had rage and pain guess who expressed it far this guy he carried all the rage and the pain in the family and 50 years later 60 years later he is still being loyal to his family now do you understand that if you don't understand what your role was you can't ever be you you can't ever stop long enough get the awareness embrace the feelings and and be willing to give up that public rigid role in order to become yourself and that's the issue here of the lost self that if we don't understand how we got set up in these family systems if we don't understand that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and that every one of us the context of our life is a family now this is a soft determinism i'm real clear about that it means we're not half as free as we think we are it doesn't mean it can't be remedied it can be i'm living proof that it can be remedied there may be some that will argue with that at times but i am living proof that it can be remedied i am living proof that you can change some of these roles and a lot a lot of people are living proof that you can change these roles and you can embrace your reality and you can become the person you were meant to be and that's what life's all about is being the person you were meant to be now not only is this a threat to the individual if you don't know this it is a threat to the whole society because what i'm going to tell you is that acting out i didn't even talk earlier about crime about rape about uh murder about the you know psychotics about all the kinds of things in our culture in a society that affect every single one of our lives every one of those roles when they have been studied carefully tend to show us reenactments of the families that they came out of they come out of violence 80 percent of the women that i've dealt with in drug addiction have had their bodies violated either physically violated by just out and out corporal violence or sexual violence something like 80 percent of the women in prostitution have been violated sexually and their families of origin that that the when we study these murderers we'll find that they're acting out exactly what was done to them in childhood in in pedophilia where there's four million child molesters in this country appear many of them 40 percent of them are acting out exactly what happened to them in their childhood so that families encode experiences in childhood and those childhoods get acted out on society now let me tell you the most scary thing about all this to me is a question that i've asked myself since the second world war ended as a little boy i used to remember running around singing the songs against hitler you know and when her guring says we are the master race we spit in his face remember that and and we had all these little songs we sang and i remember the germans were the bad guys and the japs were the bad guys and uh the russians were the good guys then if you remember and and then as i've gone you know and then when the war was over we were glad and we dropped an atomic bomb and we wiped them out and we won and those dirty rotten japs and those dirty rotten germans and then as i started growing up and thinking about this and as you know i i'd reflect on that question from time to time somehow i've just always been just absolutely aghast about auswitch and dachau i've never been able to get it out of my memory and the question that's all i've asked myself is how could hitler have happened how could hitler have happened because when i studied philosophy the greatest german philosophers and i did my master's thesis and philosophy on frederick nietzsche and you had to understand hegel and you had to understand the great kant immanuel kant who probably was the greatest moment in modern philosophy and schopenhauer and ficta and shelling then the great german theologians graf and wellhausen who made the great breakthroughs in biblical study and otto rudolph off to all these people who these great intellectuals that had advanced culture and luther and the reformation and the mandates this was germany and hitler absolutely took those german intellectuals with him and if we don't understand how that can happen then all this rational negotiation about peace it's just craziness if you you it's just wishful thinking if you think that rationality is what this is about that it has almost nothing to do with rationality what it has to do with people who are not themselves that anytime you're not your true self you can be taken by anybody that comes along i want to read you a couple of things this is this is eric erickson this is the guy that i used when i did the other series on pbs the eight ages eric erickson wrote a book called the childhood of hitler and he said that for nations as well as individuals are not only defined by their highest point of civilization and civilized achievement but also by their weakest that we can only define a nation by both its highest civilized achievement but also its weakest they are in fact defined by the distance and the quality of the distance between these points see we don't like to look at malai and we don't like to look at nagasaki and hiroshima and we avoid those pretty much just like all collective families focus on certain things and defocus other things all groups do that but those are real things that we have to look at and i'm not making any moral judgment i'm just saying the things we have to look at when i have read the accounts of what actually happened at malay my life and some of that stuff was just unbelievable as these soldiers obeying authority line people up and shot them and killed them and of course the germans did that too they lined massive numbers of jews up and put them in concentration camps and gas chambers and kill them you see one man and a several million people caused 50 million deaths in approximately four and a half or five years now that's something that we need to take a look at it is our task to recognize that the black miracle of nazism was only the german version superbly planned and superbly bundled of a universal contemporary potential the trend persists hitler's ghost is counting on it erickson says now what is the trend alice miller in a wonderful book for your own good hidden roots of violence studies also hitler's childhood hitler was beaten every day hitler came from the most authoritarian family you can imagine and as a matter of fact here's a description of alice miller hitler's family struck her structure was the exact prototype of a totalitarian regime its sole undisputed and awful often brutal ruler was the father the wife and children are totally subservient to his will his moods his whims now when i'm reading this i want you to think of families that you've come out of i want you to think of families that you know and see if this isn't if this is so far-fetched that that you have not also come out of families where father had all the power was in a sense the dictator could could demand his whims superseded anyone else's he was the only one in the system who could be angry everyone else mama could get daddy could get bad at mama mama could get bad the kids the kids could get mad at the younger kids and the youngest kid could only get mad at gerbils or whatever that if you didn't come out of a family with this hierarchy of power and violence the wife and children are totally subservient to his will his moods and his whims they must accept humiliation and injustice unquestionably and gratefully obedience is the primary rule of conduct heinrich hess when you read those texts of his the commandant at al switch they've been read over and over he was brought up in perfect obedience you must obey adults no matter what now what alice miller says that a single person can control the masses if he learns to use to his own advantage the systems under which they were raised caroline payne wrote a book called the neurosis of nations in 1925. now 1925 was before universal suffrage so almost nobody read this book it was written by a woman she argued that the weimar republic will never work because of the authoritarian structure of the german family that is the german family that will keep any possibility of democracy happening with its rigid totalitarian ruler in the father and his control and the rigid obedience and that you obey your parents and adults no matter what you never talk back you never talk children are to be spoken to but speak when they're spoken to children will be seen and not heard all of that kind of stuff that oh we say but we don't do that anymore yes we do we still believe we own children we still believe we possess them here's alice miller writing about the pedagogy of hitler's time uh adults are the masters of not the servants of the dependent child they determine in god-like fashion what is right and wrong the child is held responsible for their anger so you're making me angry uh the child must always the parents must always be shielded the child's life-affirming feelings pose a threat to the autocratic parent if children jumping around too much or their instinctual needs are there too much the child's will must be broken as soon as possible the child's life-affirming feelings pose a threat all this must happen in a very early age so the child won't notice and see the child in you if you resist as i go along with these programs if you find yourself really resisting i'm going to tell you there's a child in you that got taught a long time ago about parents you didn't know what a parent was and you didn't know what a child was when i do the programs on emotional abuse and sexual abuse and physical abuse the terror of that abuse is that always the victim thinks they're wrong they think it's their fault i am bad daddy has sexually abused me i am bad they are slapping me around i am bad they are yelling at me i am bad isn't that terrible and that's because we are educated that way now a feeling of duty produces love that's the other presupposition if children have duty they have love hatred can be done away with by forbidding it parents deserve respect simply because they are parents i've heard preachers just recently screaming out your mother can beat you and be a dope fiend and blah blah blah but you must respect him no matter what to a child's needs is wrong can anybody be happy if their needs aren't met see that's how we get this a high degree of self-esteem is harmful severity and coldness are good preparations for adult life a pretense of gratitude is better than honest grad honest ingratitude now think about that if you weren't raised with some of these presuppositions the way you behave is more important than the way you really are neither parents nor god would survive being offended uh the body is something dirty and disgusting strong feelings are harmful parents are creatures free of drives and guilt parents are always right see orderliness obedience cleanliness unselfishness considerateness but what about vitality spontaneity inner freedom inner critical judgment how do we keep people from jonestown from squirting kool-aid down their mouths and the mouths of their children if we're going to make them automatons in these wonderful obedient little robots you see this is the lost child this is the terrible thing that's happening now i'm not talking again i'm not talking about permissiveness or authoritarianism i'm talking about getting rid of both of them and being functional people and at the more functional we are that's all you have to do is be a functional human being and you will raise functional children people who do not love themselves or others cannot possibly teach their children that so it's a terrible kind of problem i want to sum it up this is saint xupery writing he's on a train and he he looks over in the fourth class section he sees this beautiful child between two people he says a golden fruit had been born of these two people i bent over the smooth brow over those mildly pouting lips and i said to myself this is a musician's face this is the child mozart this is a life full of beautiful promises little princes and legends are not different from this protected sheltered nurtured what could this child become when by mutation a new rose is born in a garden all the gardeners rejoice they isolate the rose they culture it but there is no gardener for man any 16 year old can be a parent without any training whatsoever he didn't say that i said that you need more training to be an answering service person than you do to be a parent this little mozart will live in the common stamping machine this little mozart will love shoddy music and the stench of night dives this little mozart is condemned i went back to my sleeping car what torments me tonight he said is the gardener's view it's not that generations of people haven't lived in filth and been able to make it it's it's mankind it's society that's wounded by this sight it's society that's wounded by the shame-based people and the lost souls and people who are born to be themselves and can't be themselves it's the sight a little bit in every one of us of mozart murdered [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: TT ARCHIVES

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Length: 56min 44sec (3404 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021