“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, the other smaller episodes involving Ruburt and the cat alone have always occurred during the same process, only when lesser emotional crises were involved. You were quite right in saying that Ruburt fears violence. This is one of the keynotes of his personality, and rather obviously this has to do with his early life and his mother.

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.

That he finally defended himself against her, defended himself against her emotionally and psychically, is all the more astounding. The main reason that he does not see her is not because he fears her, but because he fears the violence in himself that he has never dared direct toward her.

He projects it so that it seems to originate in the mother. At the same time the mother experiences unrecognized feelings of violence against the daughter, that she has never been able to express in physical terms.

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.

I am trying to explain this rather thoroughly, for once he realizes these connections he will not need to fear this quite human and natural aggressiveness. It only turns into violence, and into a fear of violence, when it is so meticulously denied.

He does not see his mother because he imagines subconsciously that he is protecting her from his own violence against her, lest after all these years it might erupt. Now this is ridiculous. This restrained violence has been excellently used for creative purposes.

You grew up in an environment, my dear friend, in which violence and aggressiveness became one, were expressed in some degree by both parents. But this expression was denied to the children, and you longed to retaliate. Your father’s aggressiveness, normal male aggressiveness, was blocked up, and directed against your mother. You longed to express your natural violence, you normal aggressiveness, and you also feared to do so, and dwelled mainly in your own world.

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.