From Contempt to Compassion

Last night’s episode of Desperate Housewives touched my heart. It brought up a topic I deal with in all of my books. The episode beautifully portrayed what I found in my practice when I worked with adults who had grown up to commit crimes that hurt others. When I set aside the tendency to judge and condemn or feel contempt for the hurtful surface behavior, I was able to help these people feel and release the buried pain driving them. This episode beautifully portrayed how an innocent little boy can grow up to become a “monster”—a serial killer. In the next posting,

Wow! That network television is bringing up an opportunity for viewers to awaken their hearts is itself heartwarming. It is an example of what the Maya mean when they say that 2012 is about the awakening of humanity's heart after a 5000-year period of darkness.

One of the most heinous examples of how a monster can be created is the story of Adolph Hitler. In The Truth Will Set You Free, Alice Miller presents the key elements of Hitler’s early life that led to his hatred and contempt for the Jewish people. Hitler’s paternal grandmother left her village in Austria to work as a live-in housekeeper for a Jewish merchant and his son when she was in her late teens. She got pregnant and moved back home. For fourteen years, the Jewish merchant sent child-support payments to her.

Adolph Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, grew up hating the fact that he was half-Jewish especially since the climate of the times in Austria and Germany was anti-semitic. Adolph became the target of his father's virulent hatred. Regarding the extent of Adolph's suffering, Miller's research revealed that Adolph's sister reported remembering Adolph being relentlessly and brutally beaten, mocked, humiliated, and tormented every day of his childhood.

A good German son honors his father and so Adolph repressed his rage at his father and idealized him as abused children often do. Hitler shifted his rage at his father onto the Jewish people. His relentless rage was insatiable: no amount of suffering on the part of innocent victims could ever appease his rage. Only confronting the true source of his rage and expressing it to that source could heal Hitler’s hurt. This means that Hitler would have had to express the repressed rage and hurt to the father within his memory.

We need to embrace the hurt child in us instead of holding the weak helpless child within us in contempt. This truth was brought home to me a few years ago when I saw a display on pearls at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. I learned that pearls are usually made from an invading parasite and not so much from the proverbial grain of sand. This was very interesting. In 8 Steps to Love, I had written about adult relationships fraught with childhood dependency patterns as being parasitic relationships. The message was more precise than I had imagined.

Up until this new discovery, I saw the message of the pearl as revealing that we can take the irritation of stress and use it to create the pearl of a richer, fuller, more rewarding life. Now I was discovering that the story of the pearl was revealing a deeper emotional truth.

The oyster wraps the parasite in layers of soft tissue and over time a pearl is created. Similarly, if we are to find the priceless pearl of the peace that resides in our true self, our innermost heart, we must embrace the repressed dependency longings of the hurt child in us in layers of love. We need to feel in order to heal the hurt child’s hope of finally finding someone in adulthood who can love him or her the way he or she longed to be loved.

The time when we needed the parental love that would have helped us develop a healthy self-love and self-esteem is long gone. It is not in the arms of another that we heal our wounded self-esteem, it is in our own arms. We must mourn the death of the hope of finally finding an all-loving parent in our love partner.

As the oyster contains the parasite that becomes a pearl so we must contain our tendency to form parasitic adult relationships. We can then transform the child’s immature and one-sided love into the ripened fruit of the ability to give and receive mature love.

• Today, if a feeling of contempt and a desire to hurt someone come up, then you need to stop yourself from acting on the urge. Take some slow, deep breaths. Think cool as you breathe in and calm as you breathe out. Go to a place to be alone and explore the desire to hurt the person whether it is physically, emotionally or both. There is a good chance that you are unconsciously reversing roles with the person you want to hurt. That is to say, you are exchanging the role of being a victim for the role of being a victimizer. Imagine what it would feel like to be the person hearing your words of criticism. Now initiate the inner quest and ask yourself: “When have I felt that way? Who was it that spoke to me that way? And when? How old was I?” Let’s say you see your father or mother. Now stand up to them and forcefully exclaim what upset you. For example, if your parent(s) were impatient, you might say something like the following: “I hated it when you were impatient with me and called me stupid. And that’s because I would have loved it if you had patiently explained what I was doing wrong and showed me how to do it right.”