Just Three Little Words

Should I tell you what those three little words that most parents cannot say are?
  I love you.  You are good.  Keep it up.
Most of us learn it the hard way, waiting a lifetime for our parent to say those words. It seems as though their mouths are sealed with tape, and none of the words can escape their mouths.  Not only is their mouths sealed, but also their hearts, which cannot offer the phrase they never knew they were looking for.  Wonderful.  Congratulations.
So a major anchor in French TV can state blithely:  "I  was smacked as a kid and it build my character". What a load… Can you imagine someone in this year still think that way? Why?  Because papa always insists, I am doing for your good.  And what good is that?  Hurt is good. Pain is beneficial?  The way to show love is to beat a child?  Ayayay.  These are the people who grow up loving to be beaten in sex.  I have treated them; beating means love.  What a perversion, literally.  One woman I treated needed to be beaten hard.  Whenever she misbehaved as a child, her father put her on his knee, pulled down her panties,  and spanked her.

It was the only warmth she ever knew; that little touch.  So being beaten and feeling loved became joined at the hip and had the same meaning.  Not just a matter of words but the confluence of pain with love.  So one way is to say at the same time, this is for your good.  The other way is to inadvertently offer love, that ephemeral touch, joined with punishment.  That tells us how desperate is our need for touch and love.  What we remember, even when punishment, is the love.

So why is it that a parent can’t enjoy and celebrate with you when you do something well?  Because they learned from their parents the same lesson.  Don't get excited or show enthusiasm; and they never got compliments because the zeitgeist dictates; “It will go to their head and make them arrogant”.  So we really don’t want anyone feeling good about themselves, do we?  Better we criticize so they do not get a swollen head.  Imagine this crime:  tell someone they are pretty or accomplished. Some girls who are pretty are never told so because then the boys will be after them and they might become a “slut”: trading on their beauty and not their intellect.

My friend and I were musing about our fathers and asked each other: “How could it happen that in a whole lifetime we never ever heard a word of praise?”.  Those words were sealed tight in the Primal caves of pain;  they were waiting for the same thing and priorities demanded that they be praised first and only then could they maybe whisper one word of “well done”.  But they need that praise not at age twenty but very early on when the child is beginning to develop a sense of self esteem and self worth;  in other words, when it counts and sinks in and changes the child.  Because if we wait till they are age twenty, other negative forces have sunk in to make them feel not worthy.  After all,  we would not want to “spoil” them “would we?

So what is this terror of arrogance?  Well it is not arrogance.  We don’t want our child to think he is good and better than the others. To act superior. Horrors. Imagine the crime: to think you are pretty and capable and smart and talented. So what is wrong with that? It is a throwback to the 1800s where it was "verboten".  We do everything to discourage them from trying, to get ahead. We want them to feel inferior and believe they have to struggle to earn any right.  Imagine if a child got up and announced to his parents in the morning: “I feel so strong and good and talented today”. Imagine  how parents could rush in to stop that self delusion.  The parents do not feel that way and they do not want anyone else to rip off that right. You first have to earn it. You simply cannot feel good and smart without earning it.  Another sample from the zeitgeist:  you have to work hard and earn what you get;  IT IS NOT JUST GIVEN FREELY. Otherwise the child will be spoiled rotten.  More horrors.  Children feeling good about themselves?  Ayayay