"Watching out" in each situation on the previous page, has one thing in common:

The parent's need of:

• Looking good to the outside world
• Avoiding conflict in order not to re-experience the "terrorhood" of their own childhood abuse
• Using a child in an addictive or drug-like way to not feel bad

The list would exclude any act which constitutes setting safe boundaries for a child's physical and emotional safety.

"Many mothers or other parent figures are mentally and emotionally impoverished. A likely reason is that their needs were not met as infants, children and/ or adults. They are thus so in need that they tend to use others in an unhealthy and inappropriate way to get these needs met. "(Whitfield, Healing The Child Within 23).

"it often helps them (the children) see for the first time how their behavior was dictated more by the family's needs than by their own inherent personality. This is the real violence" (Cermak 30).

"I am convinced of the harmful effects of training for the following reason: all advice that pertains to raising children betrays more or less clearly the numerous, variously clothed needs of the adult. Fulfillment of these needs not only discourages the child's development but actually prevents it. This also holds true when the adult is honestly convinced of acting in the child's best interests.

Among the adult's true motives we find:

2. The need to find an outlet for repressed affect.

3. The need to possess and have at one's disposal a vital object to manipulate.

6. Fear of the reappearance of what one has repressed, which one reencounters in one's child and must try to stamp out, having killed it in oneself earlier." (Miller 97).

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