07/04/2019
John Bradshaw, in his book ‘Healing the Shame That Binds You’, talks about Robert Firestone’s conception of the ‘Voice’. I spoke about Firestone a couple of weeks ago (The Fantasy Bond). Firestone thought that “Self-castigation, guilt, and distortions of the self are all regulated by an internal thought process, referred to here as ‘the voice’.”
Bradshaw describing Firestone’s work: “The voice is mostly created by the shame-based shut-down defenses of the primary caregivers. Just as the shame-based parents cannot accept their own weaknesses, wants, feelings, vulnerability and dependency needs, they cannot accept their children’s neediness, feelings, weakness, vulnerability and dependency. Firestone writes that the voice is the result of the “parents’ deeply repressed desire to destroy the aliveness and spontaneity of the child whenever he or she intrudes on their defenses.”
“We must remember that the shame-based caregivers were once hurting children themselves. Their pain, humiliation and shame were repressed. Their anger toward their shaming parents could not be expressed for fear of losing the parent. That anger was turned inward and became self-hatred. The parents’ defenses against their pain and shame prevent these feelings from erupting into consciousness. If the parent were to let the child express those feelings, it would threaten his own defenses. The parent must stop the child's feelings of neediness and pain so that he doesn’t have to feel his own feelings of neediness and pain.”
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Mendelsontherapy.com
