“Another reason you had nightmares about him is that you couldn’t talk to your mom about any of these feelings.”
“What was I going to tell Mom—‘I hate Daddy and I don’t know what in the world you’re doing with him’?”
“No, just ‘Mom, I hate Daddy.’”
“It wouldn’t have washed. The Bible says you honour your mother and father.”
“I’m not blaming the mother because she is in this relationship—she has her own history. She can’t very well fight and upset the applecart. But for the child, the bigger wound is the experience with the mother. You come from a mother’s body and you relate to the mother. The mother is the universe for us. It’s the universe that lets us down. When the father comes along as an abusive, threatening figure, the universe protects us or the universe doesn’t protect us."
“The nightmares I had were about my father. I detested him. Not too long ago, I was talking with my brother, who was very much browbeaten by my father. He became an aeronautical engineer in spite of all of it; although he himself has been a lifelong alcoholic, he’s a functional one, and actually excels in his field. Not long ago he said, ‘You know, Betty, I always admired you when we were kids because you weren’t afraid to stand up to Dad.’ That isn’t true—I was petrified of Daddy, but I would offer some resistance. To my brother, in his mind, I was a freedom fighter because he would never say a single word to my father."
“Nightmares are about our deepest anxieties. A kid is afraid of monsters under the bed. You turn the light on and you show him that there are no monsters, and the next minute he is afraid of the monster again. What is he actually afraid of? He’s afraid of not being protected, about not being connected enough. Maybe there’s something monster-ish in the parent … maybe the parent is angry, so the kid is really scared. The kid has all this fear, so his mind will create the image of a monster.”
“I’ve been confused all my life,” she says, “and I think my cancer had to do with confusion…. As much as I believe and understand my parents loved us the best way they knew how, it was the most confusing relationship and family environment because they were alcoholics, and still are. They’re unloving even though there is love.”
As Dr. Buck points out, a child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression. The self-shutdown serves to prevent shame and rejection. Under such conditions, Buck writes, “emotional competence will be compromised…. The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.”