“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is much more here. However he began his creative life very early as an outlet, you see, for aggressive and violent feelings. As an infant and a young child he had a strong temper, which terrified him, and he indulged in childish tantrums. Children know much more than they are given credit for.

The child even then realized that violence and aggression was somehow connected with his mother’s illness. He also, that is Ruburt also, felt the violence that is a part of his father’s personality. Suddenly the tantrums ceased. He held them back in pure terror of the consequences, for suddenly the violent-tempered mother was immobile. He feared the same fate. The father had completely disappeared. To the child the father simply vanished from the face of the earth, an equally fearful fate.

The child took all this as the punishment for violence. The mother now could no longer be violent in act. Not only that, but she was helpless to resist violence. This made the child hold back the most natural of aggressive feelings. In most cases the child can slap the parent. It may be slapped back, but it knows the slap will not really kill the parent. It is pretend.

In this case the child did not dare slap the parent, for even the slightest move upon the mother’s bed, the slightest most unintentional motion, made the mother cry out in pain. Not only unintentional violence then of the simplest kind, had to be avoided, but the unintentional motion and the thoughtless childish move. This was aggravated because when the mother became frightened she pleaded with the child to sleep with her.

Again, the quick nervous turning of the child upon the bed bought instant cries of anger and of abuse. We are getting this material through very well, and it is important. However I will give you a break for the sake of your faithful hand.

Now. It has always been extremely difficult for him to defend himself physically. As a child he simply would not do so, and to make matters worse the mother taunted him for being a coward.

She did express this violence, and again with fury, through verbal attacks to which Ruburt was extremely sensitive. But Ruburt did not even dare to express his violence verbally, because of the parent-child relationship. Added to this was the fact that the child loved the parent much more strongly, you see, than the parent ever loved the child.

Now symbolically any attack upon Ruburt becomes an attack by the parent, against which the child in Ruburt dares not retaliate. Flight becomes the only answer, the only sure solution, as flight from the parent was the only solution, for the parent could not run after.

When he was not docile as a child there was vicious instant retaliation of a most complicated nature. There was ordinary retaliation, in that he was punished through word attacks, and through such corporal punishment as the invalid could give. But, and here Joseph we come to the real heart of the matter, the mother retaliated in the main not by a direct attack upon the child, but by causing the child to believe that its misbehavior could be, and very nearly was, going to result in the death of the mother. As any child does, the child at times wished for the parent’s death, and here we see the mother acting out her own death in order to punish the child.

This could happen as a result of the smallest transgression, if the mother was in a particularly unstable condition. When the death was not acted out in drama form—this you are familiar with, we shall not go into it here—then instead the mother pretended to have an attack of one kind or another, and she told the child that the child was directly responsible.

The child therefore until its teens dared not be anything but docile. The personality was a strong one however, and the rebellion found no outlet except for creativity. Now the present personality suffers pangs of remorse over the slightest imagined wrong it may do to another.

All of this needs to be said, you see. You are both learning at a rather amazing rate. In the past you turned some repressed violence inward against yourself. Ruburt’s selling jobs were very practical for a time, for they allowed him to release aggressive feelings. You become angry when you think, rightly, that Ruburt is too docile in his dealings, but this is because you are angry at your own lack of power as a child to retaliate against the atmosphere of violence that you sensed in the child’s home.