Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
A trauma-informed perspective on oppression and authoritarianism
Much has been written about why people accept authoritarianism. In the classic text The Origins of Totalitarianism, political theorist Hannah Arendt argues that a key ingredient is social isolation, usually arising from economic inequality and a feeling of hopelessness that the material conditions of one’s life can be improved. Arendt was German-Jewish and fled the Nazis in 1933, first to France and eventually to the United States. Her understanding of American politics was very limited, especially on racial issues, but she saw parallels between her experiences under Nazism and what was happening in the U.S. After the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, in which it was revealed that the executive branch had lied in order to go to war in Vietnam, Arendt coined the term the “big lie” to explain a common tactic of totalitarian leaders: making up claims so outrageous that people think they can’t possibly be false. This was the strategy behind Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Other lies are more insidious. Media critic Parker Molloy has an excellent new piece about the dangerous rhetoric being used by extremist Republicans to manipulate public opinion, deflecting their own responsibility for inciting violence by falsely equating it with political criticism from opponents. As she says, “They're not just misrepresenting their opponents' words; they're actively working to reshape the boundaries of acceptable political discourse, chilling legitimate criticism and debate.” No one is immune to this kind of gaslighting, and a population struggling with loneliness and despair is particularly susceptible to it. A recent essay by writer Antonia Malchik reflects on the idea that people join mass movements in a search for identity and belonging, which become more important than reality. She weaves in the perspective of philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen on how disinformation and social media create echo chambers that function like cults and are extremely difficult to escape.
Here in the United States, today’s authoritarianism cannot be fully understood without the context of race. Author and poet Frederick T. Joseph implicates the denial of our country’s history of racial violence in our underestimation of the dire threat posed by MAGA Republicans:
Far too many Americans are underestimating the threats of a second American Revolution, the threat of bloodshed, the threats of retribution. Seeing these things as merely the desperate posturing of a fringe minority. As if it was not less than 75 years ago that Black Americans began to gain some semblance of civil rights in this country. As if it was not less than 75 years ago that three civil rights workers were brutally murdered during the Mississippi Burning. As if it was not less than 75 years ago that the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little Black girls in a house of worship. As if it was not less than 75 years ago that the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education challenged the doctrine of 'separate but equal' and sparked a firestorm of resistance across the segregated South.
As Joseph goes on to say, these systems of oppression have not disappeared, only changed shape. Civil rights advocate Alec Karakatsanis just published a groundbreaking study showing how police body cameras have been adopted under the guise of “reform” while actually expanding surveillance that disproportionately harms Black and brown people (you can read excerpts from the study at his newsletter: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily newsletter and her book Democracy Awakening, demonstrates that white supremacy has underpinned every movement against equality and progress in the U.S.
We must also remember that the land we call the United States today was stolen from Indigenous people. Some Native Americans call this land Turtle Island, which comes from a creation story beautifully recounted by Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer. She contrasts this with the Christian mythology that drove the brutal colonization of this country:
On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast. . .
Look at the legacy of poor Eve’s exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.
From its inception, the American project imposed the will of white Christian men on this land and its people. Dr. Kimmerer makes a powerful statement when she identifies this dynamic as abusive.
This brings me to a topic I think is too often ignored: the effect of authoritarian and abusive parenting on the way we relate to others and to the land. It is no coincidence that the traditional ideal of the American family features a domineering head of household, not unlike a dictator. “Do as I say and don’t dare to question it” is a rule in many families, whether or not it’s spoken aloud. Spanking and other forms of corporal punishment are normalized and even valorized, adults repeating the common refrain that any harm they experienced as a child was for their own good. As reported in The Atlantic earlier this year, DNA testing is proving that incest is not uncommon. From these familial origins rise societies where violence is accepted and justified at massive scales. Authoritarianism begins at home.
The idea that corporal punishment is an ultimate good is the result of denial, not observable reality. Physical punishment of children has been associated with lower moral internalization, poorer mental health, higher aggression and antisocial behavior in childhood and adulthood, and increased risk of becoming a future victim of abuse or of abusing one’s own child or spouse.1 Even without the presence of physical abuse, the coercive rules and lack of a supportive environment that are characteristic of authoritarian parenting are linked to aggression in children and adolescents.2 In 1998, there was a study about the long-term health effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, as well as measures of household dysfunction including substance abuse, mental illness, violence against the mother, or criminal behavior. In a sample of nearly 10,000 participants, the authors found that over 50% of respondents reported multiple ACEs, and that risks of both chronic disease and suicide increased with the number of ACEs. Participants with four or more ACEs were 12.2 times more likely to have attempted suicide.3 They concluded that adverse childhood experiences are “basic causes of morbidity and mortality in adult life”.
As infants, we are powerless. When we enter the world, existence is terrifying. We cannot survive on our own, and we depend on our caregivers to meet our needs. When parents consistently demonstrate care and respond to a child’s physical and emotional cues, the child learns to regulate their emotions.4 They develop a sense that their needs and emotions are valid. When this validation is absent or unpredictable, it interferes with neurobiological development. Neglected or traumatized children struggle with the concept of object permanence, the understanding that other things (and people) exist independently outside of themselves.5 They tune out their own inner knowing and surrender their feelings of right and wrong to the authority figures in their lives.
Why do so many people excuse, if not outright comply with, oppression and injustice? I think one reason is that children are often taught to deny the the wrongs that have been done to them.
I grew up with an extremely controlling stepfather who was emotionally and physically abusive. He left wounds I am still tending to in my forties, but I was able to begin the work of healing largely because my mother made it clear that his behavior was wrong. A survivor herself, my mother bravely broke a cycle of intergenerational violence with the way she raised my siblings and me. She was steadfast in her principles of nonviolent parenting and treating us as whole people in our own right. She even taught Parent Effectiveness Training classes to show other parents that a different approach was possible. I owe so much of who I am and my worldview to her example, which honestly was radical.
My mother also introduced me to Alice Miller, a Polish-Swiss psychologist whose work focused on parental abuse of children and its far-reaching effects on individuals and societies. Miller sparked my interest in psychology, the field I chose when I returned to college to finish my B.A. a few years ago. In 2021, I revisited her work in a paper about the link between authoritarian parenting and aggression:
Miller has written extensively about the effects of authoritarian child-rearing practices and child abuse, and how violence is perpetuated on a societal level through a collective denial of the damage that is routinely done to children. Authoritarianism forbids any questioning of the parent and indoctrinates the child with the belief that the cruelty and neglect they suffer is for their own good. The child learns to repress feelings of hurt, humiliation, fear, or abandonment, but these emotions persist in the unconscious and are expressed through various forms of psychopathology, as well as an urge to repeat the violence that was done to them. Culture and environment help to shape parenting styles, but the impacts of parenting also ripple outward. In For Your Own Good, Miller describes the horrific abuse inflicted on Adolf Hitler by his Jewish father, as well as the cruel child-rearing practices that were standard for the men and women who grew up to carry out his genocidal orders. She writes that those who complied with Hitler “did not let their feelings stand in their way for the simple reason that they had been raised from infancy not to have any feelings of their own but to experience their parents’ wishes as their own.6
Children are commanded to not only swallow the bitterness of injustice but to believe that it benefits them. They are denied the integrity of self and the discernment made possible by coming to know and trust one’s own thoughts and feelings. Is it any wonder that society is full of adults who perpetuate the same lie, who convince themselves that when they see harm being committed against another person or group, there must be a good reason for it?
I learned of a new facet of Alice Miller’s story when I revisited her work after twenty years. After her death, her son, Martin Miller, wrote a book about her neglect and emotional distance from him during his childhood. Her intellectual understanding of the concepts she passionately espoused did not mean she was able to practice them. She had not dealt with her own pain from her cold, repressive upbringing or the persecution she and her family experienced as Jews under Nazism. This highlights an important point: Trauma is usually passed on unconsciously. To tell the truth that our parents or other caregivers hurt or failed us in some ways is not to demonize them or blame them, but to let light and fresh air into our closets full of secrets, to allow the burdens we have carried silently to be honestly acknowledged and felt.
This feeling can be excruciating. The coping mechanisms we develop when we’re small protect us from painful emotions, and we need this armor at first. However, there comes a time when we must work to remove it, if we are to heal. Healing is a service to ourselves and to one another. Sarah Faith Gottesdiener is writing a series of essays on transforming dysfunctional relationship patterns, and she says, “We aren’t only dealing with our own lineage’s troubled epigenetics, we’re existing inside of a dominant society that is afraid of true love and intimacy.” If we have unrealized trauma, we will bring that baggage with us into all of our interactions and may cause damage even when we are trying to help through social or political action. I observe this in spaces that claim to be progressive but are actually quite hostile to those who don’t subscribe to the groupthink, and I’m able to see the same tendency more clearly in myself as I work on my personal healing. How can we think for ourselves if we are cut off from our real emotions? How can we have true empathy for others who are suffering when we haven’t learned to bear our own pain?
Writing this essay has brought up some old, buried feelings for me. In general, the practice of longer-form writing that I’ve committed to with the launch of this newsletter is revealing where I need to soften toward myself. I’m trying to make friends with the fear that I won’t succeed and will therefore be unworthy of love, to practice patience and trust instead of employing the language of my abusive parent to drive mercilessly toward a goal. A funny thing happened when I took a day off writing last Saturday: waves of grief and rage washed over me, and I felt the pain of the little girl I was with a clarity and a sharpness that I’m usually not able to access even after two decades of therapy. Though I’ve benefited greatly from therapy, I suspect that the honesty and devotion required by this writing, which I feel certain is the work of my soul, is breaking me open on a new level.
There are so many paths to healing. After finishing the latest season of The Bear last week, I reflected on what the popularity of this series at this point in time means. Besides being exquisitely written and acted with a perfect soundtrack, it’s a profound meditation on family and trauma, the difficulty of confronting our shadows and the possibilities that can open to us if we do. It is also a commentary on labor and class, and how all of the above issues intersect. It shows that healing begins with a willingness to face ourselves and the emotional truth of our experiences, and that it is sustained by community and grown in honest relationship with the people we love. I think we are yearning for these kinds of stories.
We also bear a responsibility to create societies and communities that support families. This means ensuring all people have what they need to be healthy and safe. For example, an analysis of data from the Fragile Families and Childhood Wellbeing Study finds that there is a link between food insecurity and parent-child aggression, so policies that guarantee consistent and sufficient access to food can help to reduce aggressive parenting by addressing a source of chronic stress.7 We must fight for housing as a human right and take care of our unhoused neighbors, especially in the wake of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision criminalizing homelessness. In the words of writer River Selby, who recently shared their own story of homelessness, “The decision to sweep (that’s such a gentle and misleading word) away human beings as if they are trash to be cleaned up and thrown away is inhuman and monstrous.”
Love is action. Feminist author and critic bell hooks writes that many of us absorb an inadequate definition of love in childhood, one that situates it as a feeling and ignores that real love requires being loving. From All About Love:
There can be no love without justice. Until we live in a culture that not only respects but also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know love. In our culture the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized sphere of power that can easily be autocratic or fascistic. As absolute rulers, parents can usually decide without any intervention what is best for their children. If children’s rights are taken away in any domestic household, they have no legal recourse. Unlike women who can organize to protest sexist domination, children can only rely on well-meaning adults to assist them if they are being exploited or oppressed in the home. We all know that, irrespective of class or race, other adults rarely intervene to question or challenge what their peers are doing with “their” children. . .
One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this all the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused.
Viewed through this lens, all of us have been harmed to some extent by the cultural neglect of the child, even if the adults in our lives were well-meaning and cared for us as best they could. Because the authority of the parent is deemed absolute, we learn not to question the painful parts of our upbringing. We take vows of silence that don’t just hurt us as individuals but end up contributing to our tolerance of oppression in all its forms, including known instances of abuse in our families and communities. I have so much respect for this recent essay by author Brandon Taylor, which reckons with legacies of sexual abuse and how abusers are enabled by the complicity of others in the family. He wrote it after the daughter of acclaimed short story writer Alice Munro revealed that not only was she molested by her stepfather, but that her mother knew about it and stayed with him anyway. Taylor pushes back on the idea that this is unusual or hard to understand:
What kind of mother? What kind of person? What kind of woman? etc. Well, any kind of mother. Any kind of person. Any kind of woman. She made a choice and justified it to herself through any number of inversions or self-delusions, who can say. But is this really so shocking? People do this every day. My own family did this. I saw it play out first hand. People are capable of justifying anything. Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person. To grasp for some justification as though there must be some brilliant dark inner turning of the mind that will explain it as opposed to accepting it as the everyday course of life, I mean…that, to me, betrays a lack of understanding of human nature, particularly the one advanced by Munro’s work.
To see injustice for what it is, we must unlock our own pain. If we allow it to surface, we will ache just as acutely as we did when we were children, but we then have the opportunity to honor those feelings and begin to let them go. In undertaking this challenge, we come to know ourselves better and grow our capacity to hold space for others.
May we find the courage to feel our way free from the pain that cages us. May we bear witness to one another’s wounds and heal them together. May we work to widen the path to liberation for all.
Links and Recommendations
The title of this essay is from the song “After All” by Dar Williams. Art is vital to our healing.
Alex Lewis: “A Study in Showing Up: What The Bear’s Marcus Episode Taught Me About Openness”.
I’m writing postcards to voters in swing states with Activate America. You can do the same with Progressive Turnout Project, which has paused sign-ups due to a surge of interest, but they will need more volunteers closer to the election, and you can join their email list. More volunteer opportunities to mobilize voters in other ways can be found at https://www.mobilize.us/.
References
Felitti, V.J., Anda, R.F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D.F., Spitz, A.M., Edwards, V., Koss, M.P., & Marks, J.S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245-258.
Bowlby, J. Attachment and Loss. Basic, New York 1980; Vol. 3
Miller, A. (2002). For your own good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence (4th ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
This is incredibly important to write about — also direct and intelligently written. Thank you for tenderly sharing your experiences and your beautiful mind.
I am so moved by all the years of hard work you have done and continue to do, to make sense of your personal suffering. Now you have connected it to a much larger political perspective that helps us all understand how our personal experiences inform our lives and especially the choices we make in these fraught times. It takes immense courage to allow others to really see us. Bravo, Sarah!❤️