Troy Terwilliger’s Reviews > The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self > Status Update

Knowledge of theory is essential, but knowledge of the theory must not have a defensive function: It must not become the successor of a strict, controlling mother, forcing the therapist to accommodate himself to it.

A mother cannot truly respect her child as Long as she does not realize what deep shame she causes him with an ironic remark, intended only to cover her own uncertainty. Indeed, she cannot be aware of how deeply humiliated, despised, and devalued her child feels, if she herself has never consciously suffered these feelings, and if she tries to fend them off with irony.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having Lived up to their parents' expectations.
This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty
to satisfy his parent's needs.

The newly won capacity to accept her feelings opens the way for the patient's long-repressed needs and wishes to be actualized. Some of these needs cannot be satisfied in reality, since they are related to past situations. The urgent wish for a child…may express among other things the wish to have an available mother. Unfortunately, children are too often wished for only as symbols to meet repressed needs.

There are other ways of exploiting the child apart from the sexual: through brainwashing, for instance,
which underlies both the "anti-authoritarian" and the
"strict" upbringing. Neither form of rearing takes the child's own needs into account. As soon as he is re-
garded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his
natural growth will be violently interrupted.

Cruelty was the familiar air he had breathed from early on, so why should cruelty and disdain for others
, such as he witnessed in the Nazi upward mobility, have caught his attention?

..suffering remains inaccessible and thus forms the hidden source of new and very subtle humiliation for the next generation. Various defense mechanisms will help to justify their actions: denial of their own suffering, rationalization (I owe it to my child to bring him up properly), displacement (it is not my parent but my son who is hurting me), idealization (my father's hurtful lessons were good for me), and more.

It is absolutely urgent that people become aware of the degree to which this disrespect of children is persistently transmitted from one generation to the next, perpetuating destructive behavior.

Someone who slaps or hits another adult or knowingly insults her is aware of hurting her. Even if he doesn't know why he is doing this, he has some sense of what he is doing. But how often were our parents, and we ourselves toward our own children, unconscious of how painfully, deeply, and abidingly they and we injured a child's tender, budding self?

Many adults first become
aware of their feelings of
helplessness, jealousy, and loneliness through their own children, since they had no chance to acknowledge and experience these feelings consciously in childhood.