Significant Moments: Forbidden To Complain By People Not Originally Involved

To be able to contain all this, . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.
. . . he . . .
Douglas R. Hofstadter, and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul.
. . . needed first to establish what was happening to him.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.
His face became all at once very sad.

"Listen! I spoke of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its center, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. . . ."
Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Children have little ability to contain overwhelming stimulation and intense feelings of rage.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.
If you cross examine a child of seven or eight on his day's doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep), he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific.
Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself.
What else can a child, so completely at the mercy of a regimen like this, do except adapt and suppress his genuine feelings with all his might?
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
Let’s go further and suppose that . . .
Douglas R. Hofstadter, and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul.
. . . the boy was expected to express no feelings or complaints . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.
—what then?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
For mysterious reasons Kipling's parents took him and his sister to Southsea in England, and left them both for six years in a dreary boarding-house, with complete strangers who were committed to destroying the creativity of these unusually vivacious and open youngsters. Kipling, in his never-completed autobiography Something of Myself, was to describe it as sheer hell.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Lost Prince.
Since very young children do not find support within their own self or a mirror in the eyes of a witness, they must deny the truth. Later, the patient will repeatedly and unconsciously reenact this reality . . .
Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.
. . . from the past . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Rescue.
—usually with people not originally involved
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.
What happens to the memories of a person who suffers greatly? Are they obliterated? Distorted?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Lost Prince.
One need only look for an instant at . . .
Philip Gourevitch, The Memory Thief.
. . . the scars and distortions produced by terrible childhoods . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.
. . . to wonder whether forgetting might not be a kinder curse than
remembering.
Philip Gourevitch, The Memory Thief.
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Take my termination meeting by Akin Gump on October 29, 1991. It looked like a willy-nilly set of circumstances. Yet, I have uncovered a pattern in it. Dennis Race’s behavior fits quite closely a pattern of abuse repeatedly experienced by the British writer, Rudyard Kipling, as a child. See Shengold, L. Soul Murder, at 244-245 (Yale University Press: 1989). You would never suspect, simply by reviewing the facts of the termination meeting, that it followed any kind of “typical pattern” at all.

Kipling describes a course of behavior in which he was (1) cross-examined (2) at bedtime so that he would offer up (3) incriminating statements. The cross-examination was followed by (4) humiliation. There was also the granting of (5) sudden, or incongruous, favors.

Compare: I was (1) confronted with a barrage of false and fabricated accusations (2) just before lunchtime, apparently in an effort to evoke (3) incriminating statements. The barrage of false accusations was followed by (4) humiliation. There was later the granting of (5) sudden and incongruous favors (Dennis Race telling me that I was a “talented guy,” telling me that whenever he passed by my desk he saw me hard at work, [his act of] carrying a box for me [from his office to my temporary office on the fourth floor].)