Alice Miller's quotes (sethmessenger.fr - Some short news to get away from it all).

#40392
p. 215 Education treaties always advise not to "spoil" children with too much love and delicacy (what they call "bitter love"), but rather to harden them to prepare them from the outset for real life. Psychoanalysts express it differently by saying that it is necessary to "prepare the child to endure frustrations", as if a child could not learn it alone in existence. In fact, it is exactly the opposite: a child who has received a real affection will be better able to do without it, once an adult, than someone who has never benefited from it. When a person is "greedy" for affection, it is always a sign that he is looking for something he has never had and not that he does not want to give up something that he had in too much abundance in his childhood. Something can seem like a favor from the outside without being a favor. A child can be filled with food, toys, care without ever being recognized and respected for what he was.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40393
Not having memories of your childhood is like being condemned to carry around a crate that you don't know about. And the older you get, the heavier it looks to you, and the more eager you get to finally open this thing. Jurek Becker (p74)

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40394
The banished emotions make their way and come to assault the body. (P133)

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40395
Hate doesn't make you sick. This is true of pent-up hatred, disconnected, but not from consciously lived and expressed feelings. As adults, we feel hatred only when a situation where we are denied the expression of our feelings persists. In this state of dependency, we begin to hate. As soon as we get out (and the adult can in most cases, unless he is a prisoner of a totalitarian regime), as soon as we spread out of this slavery, the hatred fades away. But as long as it remains, there is no point in forbidding one from hating, as all religions prescribe. We need to understand what is going on in order to be able to adopt this behaviour that frees us from hate-generating addiction.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40396
Once we have learned to live with our feelings instead of fighting them, the manifestations of our bodies will no longer appear to us as a threat, but as salutary reminders of our history. (P115)

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40397
We now know, as adults, that we have been mystified, that we have received, in exchange for our efforts, only a semblance of love. Why, then, do we persist in expecting that people who, for whatever reason, have not been able to love us, will eventually do so.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40398
Anger against parents, strictly forbidden but very intense in children, is transferred to other beings and to one's own self, but it is not eliminated from the world, on the contrary: by the possibility given to it to pour on children, it spreads throughout the world like a plague.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40399
When we are dealing with adults in our young age who never try to be clear with their own feelings, we are faced with extremely insecure chaos. To escape this disarray and feeling of insecurity, we use the mechanisms of disconnection and refoulement. We feel no fear, we love our parents, we trust them and try at every opportunity to conform to their desires so that they are happy with us. It is later, only in adulthood, that this fear manifests itself, usually in our relationship, and we do not understand what is happening. As in our childhood, we want, here too, in order to be loved, to accept the contradictions of the other without blowing a word.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40400
Relationships that are based only on communication distorted by the presence of a mask cannot be transformed, they remain what they have always been: pseudo-communication. A true relationship is only possible when one manages on both sides to allow oneself to oneself his feelings, to live them and to express them without fear.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40401
p. 77 In what follows, I will use the concept of "black pedagogy" to refer to this highly complex attitude, the context each time allowing us to understand what aspect I am putting in the foreground. The various characteristic aspects are directly apparent from the previous quotations which teach us the following principles: 1.that adults are the masters (not servants!) of the child still dependent; 2. let them slice good and evil like gods; 3.that their anger is the product of their own conflicts; 4.Let them blame the child; 5.that parents always need to be protected; 6.that the child's strong feelings for his master are a danger; 7. that the child must be "taken away from his will as soon as possible"; 8.that all this must be done very early so that the child "does not notice anything" and cannot betray the adult. One of the methods of "black pedagogy" is also to pass on false information and opinions to the child from the outset. The latter have been passed down for generations and are respectfully taken over by children, while not only are their validity unproven, but they are proven to be false. Among other erroneous opinions are the principles under which; 1.The feeling of duty begets love; 2.You can kill hate with prohibitions; 3.Parents deserve respect as parents; 4.Children do not deserve any respect; 5.Obedience makes you strong; 6.A high feeling of one's own worth is harmful; 7.A weak sense of one's own worth is harmful; 8.The marks of tenderness are harmful (mellowness); 9.il must not give in to the needs of the child; 10.la hardness and coldness are a good preparation for existence; 11.a simulated recognition is better than a sincere lack of recognition; 12.Appearance is more important than being; 13.The parents and God could not bear the slightest insult; 14.The bodies is something dirty and disgusting; 15.la vivacity of feelings is harmful; 16.Parents are beings devoid of impulses and free from guilt; 17. parents are always right.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40402
We cannot change anything about our past, that the damage that was inflicted on us in our childhood did not take place. But we can change, we "repair" ourselves, regain our lost integrity. To do this, we must decide to take a closer look at the knowledge that our body has stored on past events, and to bring it to our consciousness. This path is certainly uncomfortable, but it seems to be the only way that allows us to finally get out of the invisible prison of our childhood and transform ourselves, from unconscious victim of the past, into a responsible man or woman, who knows his story and lives "with her".

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40403
Whether or not contact with parents is broken up is not an essential point. The process of detachment, the path from child to adult, is indeed done internally.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40404
To get rid of this bond called "love", but which is only a sham, consisting of a mixture of gratitude, pity, expectations, denial, illusions, obedience, fear and fear of punishment.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40405
Forgiveness, in fact, has never healed anyone.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40406
Not all victims become executioners. But all the executioners were victims.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40407
My mother used, to punish me, not to speak to me for the whole days, and I felt perpetually under the threat of this silence.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40408
To defend fighting for the feeling of abandonment experienced in early childhood, the adult has a large number of mechanisms. Apart from mere denial, we most often find the perpetual struggle, exhausting, to satisfy the repressed needs, and since then perverted, with the help of symbols: drugs, groups, cults of all kinds, perversions. Intellectualizations are also common because they offer very reliable protection, which can however have fatal effects if the body - as is the case in serious diseases - takes control. All these defence mechanisms are accompanied by the reversal of the initial situation and the feelings related to it.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40409
The child behaves in such a way as to show only what is expected of him, and he completely identifies with that appearance. His true Self cannot develop and differentiate because it cannot be lived. It is not surprising that these patients complain of a sense of emptiness, say that their existence seems meaningless to them, that they do not feel at home anywhere. This void is real. There has indeed been a drying up, an impoverishment, a partial stifling of their possibilities. The child was wounded in his integrity, and this has reduced his spontaneity, his vital momentum. These children sometimes have dreams where they see themselves half dead.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40410
Today's children will be tomorrow's citizens. They were unable to defend themselves against the aggressions of their parents, they were in distress, they had to suppress their anger deeply to avoid further blows/punishments. But as adults this anger awakens and is directed in particular at their own children, but also at other people who can be used with impunity as scapegoats. In a higher position it is even possible to manipulate an entire people to pour out their accumulated anger towards millions of people. In my book "Breaking the Wall of Silence" I took Ceausescu's example by helping me with many details of how his regime works in Romania. Many people suppress their anger at others, but punish themselves for what they have been done, as they learned as children and as their religions force them to do. They get sick, are addicted to drugs and drugs and suffer from depression. They come to terms with it so they never blame their parents.

Alice Miller
(Breaking down the wall of silence)

#40411
When a human being tries to feel what he must feel, and forbids himself to experience what he really feels, he gets sick. Unless he makes his children pay for the way, by projecting his pent-up emotions on them. (P11)

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40412
Vera is right. We adults do not need unconditional love. Not even from our therapist. This is a child's need, impossible to satisfy afterwards. Who has not mourned this loss in his childhood feeds on illusions . Our therapist must show honesty, respect, trust, empathy and understanding towards us, we need his ability to clarify his own feelings and not make us bear the weight. And all this, we can get it. But if someone promises to love us "unconditionally", perhaps we should be wary. Vera has finally found what she had vainly sought for so long, she owes it to her firm resolve to find the truth and no longer be deceived. The signals from her body helped her in this way.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40413
How do you define "child abuse"? For me it is abuse when a child is not respected, humiliated, deceived or sexually abused. In fact, in all these cases I am rarely contradicted. On the other hand, I cannot inform parents that hitting a child is a case of abuse that is not without consequences. Everywhere we call this practice education. Corporal punishment has been practiced for millennia and is seen as a way to educate children in the best possible way. Almost all parents today were beaten as children and unfortunately they were forced to learn early from their parents that this practice was harmless and fair. So this erroneous "knowledge" is recorded by the brain and most people have trouble erasing it. To understand otherwise would mean questioning their own parents and would frighten most people. They expect to be punished precisely because the truth was forbidden to the child.

Alice Miller
(Source inconnue)

#40414
Seeing the passion with which Catholic clerics - men who have chosen not to have children - fight abortion, one is led to wonder what drives them. Is it to show that unre lifetime- like perhaps their own destiny - is more important and precious than life lived? Is this perhaps the opinion of the parents of the virulent opponents of abortion, even though they have formulated it differently? Or is it a matter of inflicting on others the fate that one has known oneself? All these motivations are possible, and identically dangerous, because they push, in the darkness of repression, to indiscriminate and destructive actions.

Alice Miller
(Breaking down the wall of silence)

#40415
At some point in her therapy, Linda, 42, fell in love with a man older than herself, intelligent and sensitive, but who, eroticism aside, automatically closed to anything he could not grasp intellectually. It was precisely to this man that she wrote long letters, trying to explain to her how far she had come in therapy. She managed to ignore all the signs of her reluctance and redoubled her efforts, until she had to admit that she had again found a substitute for her father, and, as a result, was unable to give up hope of finally being understood. She was overwhelmed with terrible feelings of shame, which ronged her for quite a long time. She once said, "I find myself as ridiculous as if I had spoken to a wall and waited for him to answer me. Like a stupid child." I asked him, "Would you go back to the sight of a child who has to put his sentence in a wall because he has no one else?" The desperate sobs that my question brought to my patient opened up access to part of her true past, which had been marked by infinite loneliness.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40416
I believe that in order to be able to love, we must have the right to be who we are: without loopholes, without masks, without façade.

Alice Miller
(Free to Know: Opening Our Eyes to Our Own History)

#40417
This book deals mainly with the conflict between what we feel and know, since it remains recorded in our bodies, and what we would like to feel to conform to the moral norms etched in us from an early age.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40418
I tried to make good feelings and ignore the bad, to stay in tune with the morality and the system of values that I had accepted. Actually to be loved as a girl. It was a pure loss: at the end of the day, I had to recognize that I could not create love on command and that on the other hand it was born spontaneously in me, since I did not force myself to do so and did not try to conform to moral precepts. To really love I need to feel free and accept all my feelings, even if they are negative.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40419
As long as one despises the other and overvalues performance, one escapes the sorrow of having been loved only for his performances. The grandiosity preserves the illusion of having been loved. But, by avoiding this grief, one remains, deep down, the despised.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40420
The peace to which so many human beings aspire cannot be given to us from the outside.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40421
"However, the older we get, the more difficult it becomes to find with others the parental love that we lacked in our early years. However, expectations will not disappear, quite the contrary: they will simply be transferred, mainly to children and grandchildren. Unless we become aware of these mechanisms and try, through the lifting of repression and the abandonment of denial, to look as accurately as possible at the reality of our childhood. It is on this condition that we can then build in ourselves to be able to satisfy the needs that since our birth, and sometimes even before, wait to be satisfied. It is then that we can give ourselves the attention, respect, understanding, necessary protection and unconditional love that our parents have denied us. To achieve this, we need to experience the love for the child that we had, otherwise we will not know what the word love means. If we are to learn it through therapy, we will need someone who can accept us as we are, accompany us and protect us with respect and sympathy, help us understand why we have become what we are. This fundamental experience is essential to enable us to assume the parenting role towards the abused child buried in us. An educator who wants to shape us will be unable to make us live it, as will a psychoanalyst who believes that, in the face of childhood traumas, we must remain neutral and interpret our stories as fantasies. No, what we need is exactly the opposite, namely a committed companion, able to share our horror and indignation when our emotions will make us discover together our sufferings as little children - all that we have been able to endure, sometimes in total solitude, when our soul and body struggled to survive. We need such an accompanist, whom I call a lucid witness, to reach and assist this child in us, to have us decipher our body language and meet our needs, instead of ignoring them, as was the case for a long time, as our parents once did. I emphasize that point. With the help of a competent accompanist, not neutral but our ally, they are able to find his truth.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40426
I told Suzanne that Klaus [a friend] sometimes gets on my nerves, without me knowing why. Still, I love it. I always get for little things, and then I blame myself. He is full of good intentions, says he loves me and I know he cares a lot about me. Why am I so petty-minded? Why am I bothering about scraps? Why can't I be more generous? [...] I had written Klaus a long missive where I tried to say how bad I feel when he wants to dissuade me from my feelings [...]. [...] He didn't answer me right away. I was already apprehensive of his anger, his exasperation at my incessant ruminations, his rejection, but I still expected a reaction. Instead, after about eight days, I received a letter that absolutely stunned me. He thanked me for mine, but without a word about its contents. On the other hand, he told me about his holidays, his plans to hike in the mountains, told me about the people he dated at night. I felt the ground slip under my feet. [...] For the first time, I clearly realized that throughout my childhood I had known only this, this feeling of being destroyed in my soul. What was happening to me now with Klaus, who simply ignored my letter, was not a new experience. I've known that for a long time. [...] Anorexia kept saying, "I'm starving because no one wants to talk to me." [...] The more I see, through my memories, my father's behavior, the more I understand the origin of my attachment to Klaus and other friends of the same kind.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40431
1991 u p d a t e: Ten years have passed since the publication of my first three books: the drama of the gifted child is for your own good, the child in terror. Nevertheless, the facts and connections I have outlined, based on many years of practice, have remained equally valid and, unfortunately, current. But what has changed radically is my attitude towards psychoanalysis, from which I have since separated. I was forced to do this when I realized that psychoanalytic theory and practice conceal or disguise the causes and consequences of child abuse, including by characterizing facts as fantasies. Moreover, as I know from experience, such treatments can be dangerous, as they cement the distress caused by childhood torments rather than end them.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40432
In my opinion, the "wasted time" that the narrator seeks [in Proust's work] is this life of strong emotions not consciously experienced.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40433
The feeling of guilt almost suffocated me when I tried to evade the requirement to help others and save them from their disarray. I didn't do it until very late in my life.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40434
So we have once again ... the picture of correct and harmless parents to whom, for incomprehensible reasons, the Good God or the devil have sent a monster into their cradle. But monsters don't fall from heaven or hell in bourgeois dining rooms. Once one knows the mechanisms of identification with the aggressor, of splitting the self, of projecting and transferring one's own childhood problems onto one's child, which make education a real persecution, one can no longer be content with medieval explanations.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40435
This faculty of the human body never ceases to amaze me. He rises against lying with astounding tenacity and intelligence. Moral and religious prescriptions fail to deceive or disorient him. (p.105)

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40436
The deliberate use of humiliation, which satisfies the needs of the educator, destroys the child's self-awareness and makes him uncertain and complex, but is presented as a good deed.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40437
We must not only know what happened to us, but also be able to measure what it has done to us.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40438
The first stone of addiction is probably laid at the very beginning of life, as is that of bulimia and other eating disorders. The body notifies that it absolutely needed something, in the past, when it was a tiny little creature. However, this message is misunderstood as long as emotions remain off the grid.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40439
I bedred more and more clearly how toxic my efforts to love someone who had ruined my life were. For they took me away from my truth, forced me to deceive myself, to play the role imposed on me from an early age, the role of the wise little girl who submits to transvestite emotional needs in education and morality.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40440
Older, weakened parents seek support from their adult children and use guilt to get their pity. It is this same compassion that may have been and continues to hinder the child's personal development from the outset.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40441
"You'll never do it the right way if you settle for the desires of others. We can only be who we are, and we cannot force our parents to love us. There are parents who can only love their children's mask, and as soon as that mask falls, they often say, "I just want you to stay the way you used to."

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40444
For me, knowledge and consciousness have always been a positive thing. It seemed to me illogical, therefore, that God forbade Adam and Eve to discover the essential difference between good and evil. (...) I intuitively refused to consider obedience as a virtue, curiosity as a sin, and ignorance of good and evil as the ideal state, for for I was the apple of knowledge to identify Evil and, therefore, represented liberation, and therefore Good. (p.15)

Alice Miller
(Free to Know: Opening Our Eyes to Our Own History)

#40445
You can only help someone if they seek help and know they are in a state of distress. However, most parents who seriously abuse their children are not aware of their distress. Nor do they feel guilty, because they have only experienced similar treatments as children and have learned to regard it as fair.

Alice Miller
(Forbidden knowledge)

#40446
I focus on the first experiences of life when I try to understand the deep roots of delinquency behaviour. In spite of this particular interest, the following thing happened to me: after writing all this chapter and controlling the passages I had retained in the book, I realized that I had skipped the passage most important to me. It was the quote about the baby's blows. The omission of this passage, which was nevertheless of considerable importance to me since it confirmed my thesis, seemed to me to prove to me the difficulty we had in representing a mother beating a baby, not defending ourselves from this image and fully accepting its emotional effects. This is probably the reason why psychoanalysis deals so little with these things, and why the consequences of these childhood experiences have been so little studied.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40447
The inner need to constantly build new illusions and denials to avoid living one's own truth disappears once this truth has been lived. We see then that all our lives we feared something, we defended ourselves against something, which can no longer happen, because it has already happened, and this at the beginning of our life, when we were helpless.

Alice Miller
(The child in terror)

#40448
But what happens when there is no longer any trace of this life, because education has succeeded perfectly and to the end, as was the case for example in men like Adolf Eichmann or Rudolf Huss? They were so well trained in obedience, and they were trained so early, that this education never failed, that this building never had the slightest crack, that it remained perfectly impervious and that no feeling ever shook it; these beings executed all the orders given to them until their last hour without ever questioning their contents. They did not execute them because they considered them to be just orders, but simply because they were orders exactly as the "black pedagogy" wants.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40449
The repression of instinctive needs is only part of society's massive repression of the individual. However, because it is not only carried out in adulthood but from the first days of life, through parents often full of good intentions, the individual is not able to find in himself without outside help the traces of this repression. It is like a man who would have printed a mark on his back and who, without the help of a mirror, could never discover it. The analytical situation is one of those that presents this kind of mirror.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40450
When I call abuse these invisible wounds, I most often find in front of me resistance and open indignation.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40451
The "love" felt for his parents by the abused former child is not love. It is an attachment burdened with expectations, illusions and denials, and whose ransom will be very high.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40452
We will not travel the path to the adult state by showing tolerance for the cruelties of which we have been victims, but in the recognition of our truth and in a growing empathy with the abused child.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40453
I see in Nietzsche's grandiose work a cry, calling on man to free himself from lies, exploitation, hypocrisy and his own conformism. But no one, and even less than any other, knew how much, as a child, he had suffered from these plagues. [...] He suffered from rheumatism, which, as well as his violent headaches, were certainly attributable to the suppression of strong emotions. He also had many other health problems [...]. No one could see that he was, in fact, suffering from the false morality that permeated his daily life, since everyone was bathed in the same atmosphere. But his body felt these lies more acutely than that of others.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40454
The initial negative emotion is an important signal of the body. If we ignore his message he will have to send new ones to be heard.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40455
even the greatest criminal of all time did not come into the world as a criminal.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40456
But we are so used to perceiving all that is said to us as moral prescriptions and preaching that pure reflection is sometimes felt as a reproach and is, therefore, absolutely not received. We rightly defend ourselves against new demands, when we have already been asked too much by imposing too early, and often by force, the rules of morality. The love of neighbour, the gift of self, the spirit of sacrifice - only beautiful formulas - but that cruelties cannot be hidden for the simple reason that they are imposed on the child and this at a time when the provisions of love of one's neighbour cannot be present. Because of the constraint it is not uncommon for them to be even smothered in the egg, and what remains is then a tireless obligation. It is like a land too which nothing can grow, and the only hope of obtaining in spite of all the love demanded lies in the education of one's own children, which in turn can be ruthlessly coerced.

Alice Miller
(The essentials of Alice Miller)

#40457
It is not true that evil, destruction, perversion are necessarily part of human existence, even if it is repeated all the time. But it is true that evil is constantly reproducing and that it is creating for millions of human beings an ocean of suffering that could also be avoided. When the ignorance resulting from the refoulements of childhood is lifted and humanity is awakened, this production of evil can be stopped.

Alice Miller
(Forbidden knowledge)

#40458
It is not a question of condemning the parents as a whole, but of placing themselves from the point of view of the child suffering and who has no right to speak, to renounce an attachment that I describe as destructive. It consists, as I have already said above, of a mixture of gratitude, pity, refoulement, embellishment of reality, as well as many expectations, always vain and doomed to remain so.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40459
If one is willing to realize the amount of energy that children must use to survive cruel and often extreme sadistic treatment, one can only be optimistic. (p. 108)

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40460
One reader wrote to me: "If Hitler had had five sons to avenge the torture inflicted on him as a child, the Jewish people would probably not have been massacred. You can let go of all that you once suffered on your own child with impunity, because the murder of your own child's soul can always be camouflaged under words such as education and discipline learning. (p. 67-68)

Alice Miller
(Free to Know: Opening Our Eyes to Our Own History)

#40464
At the age of thirty, Chekhov moved to Sakhalin Island, which was a penal colony, to describe the terrible life of the deportees and the abuse they were subjected to. He probably did not realize that he was theirs.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40465
Every abused child probably has to adopt that kind of attitude [trying to find something positive in every atrocity experienced] to survive. He truncats his perceptions and tries to see a benefit in what, for an outside look, is clearly a crime.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40466
We know how much Hitler used to fascination with women. In their eyes, he embodied the figure of the father who knows exactly what is right and what is wrong, and he also offered them an outlet for the hatred they had accumulated as children. It was this combination that earned Hitler the crowds of men and women who rallied to him. For all these beings had been trained in obedience, they had been raised in the sense of duty and Christian virtues; they had to learn early on to suppress their hatred and needs.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40467
A political commitment can be fuelled by the unconscious anger of the abused child, the child who is trapped, exploited, suffocated, trained. This anger may find some outlet in, for example, the fight against political opponents, while preserving the idealization of one's own and concrete reference person in early childhood. The old infeodation can then be moved to leader figures or groups. If the disillusionment and grief that follows can be experienced, it usually does not lead to the relaxation of social or political commitment, but simply to a liberation: instead of acting under the empire of the compulsion of repetition, one can act in a clear, conscious and according to an objective, without harming oneself. The inner need to constantly build new illusions and denials to avoid living one's own truth disappears once this truth has been lived. We see then that all our lives we feared something, we defended ourselves against something, which can no longer happen, because it has already happened, and this at the beginning of our life, when we were helpless.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40468
I do not aspire to a Paradise that makes obedience and ignorance the condition of bliss. I believe in the power of love, which, for me, does not mean to be well-behaved and obey. Love does not go without fidelity to oneself, to one's feelings and needs. And the aspiration for knowledge is one of them. God clearly wanted to deprive Adam and Eve of this fidelity to oneself.

Alice Miller
(Free to Know: Opening Our Eyes to Our Own History)

#40469
This awakening of sensitivity to the suffering of childhood has far-reaching consequences: suddenly it is no longer possible to consider cruelty, perversion and crime as educational practices used for our good, we are forced to take a stand and stop embellishing crimes. Some are already capable of it. They no longer want to help hide the truth. They work with abused children, they see what children are done every day, they see that the state, the school and the Church protect the crime without recognizing it as such. Who are they? If they, like all of us, had to undergo "black pedagogy", they must have met at least one being in childhood who was not cruel to them and thus offered them the opportunity to perceive the cruelty of their parents. For this requires a helping witness, a corrective witness. A child who knows nothing but cruelty, who has not benefited from the presence of such a witness, will not identify cruelty for what it is.

Alice Miller
(Forbidden knowledge)

#40470
According to the ideas still widespread, children are devoid of sensitivity, the suffering inflicted on them remains incent, or has less consequences than in adults, because "they are still children". Until recently, it was even allowed to operate on children without anesthesia. The circumcision of little girls, the circumcision of little boys, as well as sadistic initiation rituals, are still common in many countries. Beating an adult is called torture, beating a child as an educational measure. Don't these facts alone show that most people's brains have a "lesion", a big hole where empathy should reside, especially THE KNOW? Basically, this observation alone is enough to show that beaten children keep brain damage, because almost all adults are insensitive to violence against children!

Alice Miller
(Your life saved at last)

#40471
Sensitive beings do not allow themselves to be transformed overnight into exterminators. But in the application of the "final solution" these were men and women who could not be stopped by their own feelings, because they had been educated from the cradle not to feel their own emotions but to live the desires of their parents as their own. As children, they had been proud to be hard and not to cry, to "joyfully" do all their tasks, not to be afraid, in other words, in the background: not to have an inner life.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40472
The father of the paranoid Schreber, whose case Freud recounts, had written in the mid-19th century several textbooks of education so popular in Germany that some were reissued forty times and translated into several languages. The author repeated tirelessly that it was necessary to start educating the child as soon as possible, as early as his fifth month, to free him from the "germs of evil".

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40473
If we have not had the opportunity as children to live consciously and overcome the contempt that was inflicted upon us, we perpetuate it.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40474
Even if suppressed emotions manage to rise to the surface, they will find it difficult to compete for the early-acquired mechanisms. It is that they have served so long to minimize pain. No more using it is like swimming against the current; not only is it scary, but it also creates feelings of isolation. One is exposed to the reproach of tearful self-pity. Yet it is here that the path to maturity begins.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40475
Emotional blindness is an extremely expensive and often self-destructive luxury.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40476
I feel foreign, sometimes even considered a leper, only because I don't want to be or become the woman they want to make of me. I prove it by my anorexia. Look! Do you feel like I'm averse to my appearance? Good, it forces you to see that there's a problem, either at home or at home. You look away, you think I'm crazy. It hurts, of course, but being with you would be a lot worse.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40477
I want to live by being the person I am. But they won't let me. No one lets me. Everyone has plans for me.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40478
Kafka's "fasting champion" explains at the end of his life that he stopped feeding because he could not find a food he liked. Anita could have uttered the same sentence, but only after her recovery, for it was at this time that she knew what food she needed, which she had been missing since childhood and which she sought: true emotional communication, without lies, without pseudo-"concerns", without feelings of guilt or reproach, without warnings, without croquemitaine, without projections.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40479
The release of depression does not lead to continuous cheerfulness or the absence of suffering, but rather a new vitality, that is, the freedom to live spontaneous feelings.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40480
The universally accepted precept "You will honor your father and mother" often prevents us from letting our true feelings emerge, and we pay for this compromise through bodily ills.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40481
When a human being tries to feel what he must feel, and forbids himself to experience what he really feels, he becomes ill. Unless he makes his children pay the bill, by projecting on them his pent-up emotions.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40482
The second crucial element, on which one must focus one's efforts from the second or third year, is absolute obedience to the parents and those responsible, and the approval of everything they do. This obedience is so important that, in fact, all education is nothing but the learning of obedience. But this obedience is not easy to instill in the child. It is only natural that the mind wants to follow its own will, and if one has not done it properly in the first two years, it is difficult to achieve its goal afterwards. These early years also have the advantage that force and coercion can be used. Over time, children forget everything they went through in infancy. If we can take away their will, then they will never remember having one, and the intensity of the means that we have had to implement will not have any negative consequences. (NDR: A. Miller quotes here texting the pedagogical methods of the "great" pedagogue Schreber, whose first victim was the son, Patient of Freud.)

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40483
The child has an innate need to be taken seriously and considered for what he is. "What it is" means: his feelings, his feelings and their expression, and this from the infant stage.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40484
Nor is my anti-pedagogical position directed against a certain type of education but against education per se, even when it is anti-authoritarian. And that attitude is based on experiences that I will report later. To begin with, I would like to point out that it has nothing in common with the Rousseauist optimism of good human "nature".

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40485
The more I look at these issues, the more I tend to think that courage, honesty and the ability to love others should not be seen as "virtues" or moral categories, but as the consequences of a more or less lenient destiny.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40486
Later, as an adult, a child with these gifts [of superior spirit] will be able to use extraordinary insight to criticize various ideologies . . . because in these cases he has his intellectual faculties intact. May within the group to which he belongs himself (an ideological current or a theoretical school, for example) that reflects the family situation of childhood, this being will retain a naïve docility and an inability to criticize that seem to disprove the brilliant qualities that it otherwise shows. [...] For example, Martin Heidegger was quite capable of distinguishing himself from traditional philosophy and in doing so abandoning the masters of his adolescence, while he was unable to detect the contradictions of Hitler's ideology that were to be evident in his intelligence. It is because he devoted to this ideology the infantile fascination and fidelity that do not allow criticism.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40487
The fascination with Rimbaud's poetry, many young people whose childhood was similar to his, probably also stems from the dark feeling of finding their own history

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40488
It is apparently essential for human beings to have access to their emotions so that they can manage their lives.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40489
Similar behaviours are observed in many psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and therapists. Of course, they don't use words like; bad, dirty, mean, selfish, depraved. Rather, they speak of "narcissistic," "exhibitionist," "destructive" or "borderline" patients, without seeing that they lend these words a depreciating meaning. It may be that their abstract vocabulary, their objective attitude, and even their theorizations and their passion for making diagnoses have something in common with the indignant looks of the mother of the boy (or girl) of 3 years, wonderfully adapted, buried in them.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40490
Neverth this, the new scientific discoveries confirm what many therapists have learned from their own experience, namely that acting rationally and constructively requires not only intact thinking, but also that we have access to our authentic emotions. Technology will never be able to replace this function of our brain, and therefore we must finally take care of our emotional life.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40491
You can rape a child other than sexually: for example, I think of the form of rape practiced through indoctrination that underlies both "anti-authoritarian" and "good education" education.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40492
It is not the unsuspendability of his impulses that humiliates the child, but the contempt shown to him.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40493
To despise the smallest, the weakest is thus the best bulwark against the irruption of the feeling of one's own powerlessness, and the expression of the weakness from which one dissociated himself. The strongman, who knows his impotence, because he has lived it, does not need to prove his strength by contempt.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40494
... it is not only the "beautiful" and "good" feelings, those that please us, that make us alive, bring depth to our existence and offer us conclusive views. But often, on the contrary, those uncomfortable, unseemly feelings that we would prefer to avoid: shame, envy, jealousy, disarray, rage, grief, feeling helpless. In therapy, we can live them, understand them, coordinate them.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40495
For those who want to live without depression or "drugs", it remains necessary to find support in the true Self, that is, in access to their true needs and feelings, and the possibility of expressing them clearly.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40496
Parents must honor and love their children, so that they, their children and their children's children live their truths through long and authentic lives.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40497
This kind of phenomenon is common. The mother, by her position, clearly has an unlimited power to give bad conscience to her adult daughter. By guilt her ingeniously, she can easily obtain from her the presence and care that, in her childhood, her own mother refused her.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40498
The emotions experienced do not last forever. (...) They only attach to the body when they are banished.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40499
Not having memories of your childhood is like being condemned to carry around a crate that you don't know about. And the older you get, the heavier it looks to you, and the more eager you get to finally open this thing." Jurek BECKER

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40515
Through these stories, we will, I hope, open our eyes and see what a small child can endure without society coming to his aid. We will also understand how a hatred is created that leads to innocent children turning into adults capable, for example, of organizing, approving, executing, justifying and forgetting the monstrous holocaust.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40516
His tolerance is limitless, he is always faithful and even proud that his father, who beats him like a bully, never hurts a beast; and he is ready to forgive him all, to always take all the blame on him, to feel no hatred, to quickly forget what happened..............

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40517
A book, even if written with the utmost sensitivity to the problems of others, cannot replace a good therapist.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40518
A human being capable of sincerely admitting his feelings, without self-mystification, does not need to be blundered by ideologies and, therefore, will not be a danger to others.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40519
Calling for love and reason will remain in vain as long as we forbid ourselves from clearing up our feelings as children. It is futile to try to fight hatred with arguments: we must understand where its source is and use tools to extinguish it.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40520
Daring to know who deserved their anger, they will find their way into reality without sinking into the blindness of the abused child who must spare his parents, and, as a result, needs scapegoats.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40521
The stifling of freedom and the compulsion to adapt do not begin in the office, the factory or the political party, but from the first weeks of life. This yoke will later be repressed and that is why it will remain, by its nature, inaccessible to any argument. For the nature of adaptation or subjection does not change when only one of its object is replaced by another.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40522
[H.H. Hesse] I cannot speak in happier terms all the hours of my life during which, forgotten from the world, I enjoyed a brief rest, all my solitary walks in these beautiful mountains, all those moments when a little unexpected happiness or a love stripped of all desire has removed me from yesterday and tomorrow, than by comparing them to this green image of my early years.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40523
It is apparently essential for human beings to have access to their emotions so that they can manage their lives.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40524
"Unlike the small child, the adult has choices. He can draw on his experiences, has the ability to reason as well as free access to information. All this he can use, if he wants to. If he is determined not to confide in a therapy that would reduce him from the outset to impotence, he has a good chance of being able to learn about the person and the training of the therapist, before deciding for or against a confrontation with his childhood. He can quietly ask, during the first interview, how the therapist came to practice this profession, m-why he chose it, what he used to do, etc. Unfortunately, most people do not ask these questions, although it is by no means forbidden and would be illuminating.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40529
"The world has not changed. How much horror and meanness around me! And I see them even more acutely than before. Yet, for the first time, I find life truly worth living. Maybe because I feel like, for the first time, I'm living my own life. And this is an exciting adventure. But I understand my thoughts of suicide better now, especially the ones I nurtured in my youth. Continuing seemed meaningless... in fact because, in a way, I was living a foreign life, which I did not want and which I was ready to destroy. »

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40536
An imposed love is not love: it leads at most to make "as if", to relations without real communication, to a simulacrum of affection charged with concealing resentment, even hatred. Such love will never lead to a real encounter.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40537
The absolute submission of the child to the will of the child was not only reflected in the subsequent political subjugation (for example in the totalitarian system of the Third Reich), but, even before, by the internal predisposition to any new subjection, as soon as the child left the family home. How could a being who had only developed in himself the mere ability to obey the orders given to him have lived independently with this inner void? A military career was the best way to continue to be prescribed what we had to do. When someone like Adolf Hitler, like the father, claimed to know exactly what is good, just and necessary for others, it is not surprising that, in their nostalgia for submission, so many people celebrated the coming of such a character and helped him conquer power. All these young men had finally found for the rest of their lives a substitute for this figure of the father without whom they were unable to live.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40538
The whole emotional development of a human being and thus his narcissistic balance of which this development is the basis depends on how his mother experienced from the birth of the child the expression of the needs and emotions of that child.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40539
The idealization of maternal love is one of the taboos that have survived all the demystification tendencies of that time.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40540
The worst selfish is the one to whom the idea never came that he himself is a selfish. Many people do not have needs just because they do not know them.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40541
"From the beginning, I had been implicitly given the mission of giving my parents the consideration, attention and love that their own parents had denied them. But, to persist in this attempt, I had to renounce my truth, my true feelings. Even if I struggled to accomplish this impossible mission, I was long consumed by deep feelings of guilt. Besides, I also had a debt to myself: my own truth."

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40542
The body does not understand this moral at all, it has nothing to do with the Fourth Commandment, and, unlike our reason, it does not allow itself to be fooled by beautiful words.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40543
However, public opinion is far from realizing that what happens to the child in the early years of life inevitably affected society as a whole, and that psychosis, drugs and crime were coded expressions of early childhood experiences. This idea is very often disputed, or is accepted only intellectually, while the practice (political, legal or psychiatric) remains strongly dominated by medieval representations all penetrated by projections of the principle of evil; all this for the simple reason that the intellect has not taken on the areas of the emotional.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40544
This tenacious, destructive and unfounded feeling of guilt, we can only overcome it if we do not commit, in order to defend ourselves, new faults, very real, in the present.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40545
However, it is not easy to immediately discover the real reasons for this anger, because it is first directed at people who want to help us - for example our therapists and our own children - against people who scare us less, and who are certainly the triggers but not those responsible for our anger.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40546
We cannot change anything about our past, that the damage that was inflicted on us in our childhood did not take place. But we can change, we "repair" ourselves, regain our lost integrity. To do this, we must decide to take a closer look at the knowledge that our body has stored about past events, and to bring them to our consciousness.

Alice Miller
(The drama of the gifted child)

#40547
It is also important and useful not to lose sight of, throughout this reading, that what I refer to as parents or children does not correspond to specific persons but to states, situations or statutes that concern us all, because all parents have been children and most of those who are now children will in turn become parents.

Alice Miller
(It's for your own good.)

#40548
Beating a child is always an abuse, with serious consequences that he will often carry the weight of his whole life.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40549
I call abuse the method of "education" based on violence. For not only is the child denied his right to be human to respect and dignity, but he is made to live in a kind of totalitarian regime where he becomes impossible to perceive the humiliations, debasement and contempt of which he is a victim, let alone to defend himself.

Alice Miller
(Our bodies never lie)

#40550
Any therapeutic process, but especially the confrontation with early trauma, requires competent and loyal support. [...] ... in the absence of such support the client can become the victim of serious manipulations. They are not only practiced in the sects we know, but also in some so-called therapeutic centers that have already taken on sect structures.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40551
Neverth this, the new scientific discoveries confirm what many therapists have learned from their own experience, namely that acting rationally and constructively requires not only intact thinking, but also that we have access to our authentic emotions. Technology will never be able to replace this function of our brain, and therefore we must finally take care of our emotional life.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40552
It is their hatred of life and their love of destruction that make nationalists all over the world so similar. It is almost an international uniform, coming from the same source, from the same story: the torments suffered in childhood, torments either buried in complete oblivion or which one refuses to perceive, and which, until recently, were totally denied by society as a whole.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40553
Consciously experiencing a justified emotion is liberating not only because the body, which it has been holding since childhood, can then "unload", but above all because its emergence opens our eyes to reality, frees us from our illusions, makes us repressed memories and often leads to the disappearance of our symptoms. That's why living this experience strengthens us and allows us to evolve. When the emotion has finally been felt, understanding that it is justified, it subsides, and we are no longer prisoners of it. True detachment then becomes possible. It is quite different from refoulement.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40554
The future of democracy depends on this individual approach. Calling for love and reason will be futile as long as we forbid ourselves from clearing up our feelings as children. It is futile to try to fight hatred with arguments: one must understand where its source is and use tools to extinguish it.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40555
Daring to know who deserved their anger, they will find their way into reality without sinking into the blindness of the abused child who must spare his parents and, therefore, needs scapegoats.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40556
It is useful for the success of therapy for the patient to become aware of the destructive patterns of his parents. But as I have already said: to free ourselves completely from these models, intellectual understanding is not enough. We need to have access to our emotions. The true goal of therapy is achieved if, thanks to the emotional perlaboration of the history of his childhood, the patient regains his vitality. He will then be able to use the resources provided by his therapy when current events come to revive the past. Over time, he will learn to implement them more and more effectively.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40557
Nationalism, xenophobia and fascism are nothing but an ideological cover-up of this flight. One flees the tortured memories repressed of the contempt suffered in the past by taking refuge in a dangerous contempt of humanity, which will be erected as a program. The cruelty that the child once secretly suffered is evident in the groups of young people who engage in violence.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40558
Unconscious content remains immutable and timeless - it is only with the realization that the beginning of a change can be born.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40559
The purpose of therapy is not to correct the patient's fate, but to allow him to meet his own destiny and to carry out the work of mourning. The patient must be able to find in him his original feelings repressed, in order to be able to consciously live the unconscious manipulation and lack of consideration of the parents, and to free himself from it.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40560
What makes us sick is the impenetrable, the social constraints that we have internalized through the eyes of parents and from which no reading or acquisition of knowledge can get rid of us, and also our unconscious memories.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40561
Words alone, even the most skilful interpretations, only maintain or deepen the gap between intellectual speculation and the knowledge of the body. This is why telling a drug addict that his addiction is a reaction to sick society will not free him from his addiction.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40562
Despite the great public echo, the success and the Nobel Prize, the Hermann Hesse of middle age suffered from this tragic dissociation from his true Self that doctors call depression.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40563
Despite the great public echo, the success and the Nobel Prize, the Hermann Hesse of middle age suffered from this tragic dissociation from his true Self that doctors call depression.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40564
It is common for a child's gifts (intensity of feelings, depth of sensitivity, curiosity, intelligence, and awakened mind, which naturally are accompanied by a critical sense) to confront his parents with conflicts which they have long sought to defend themselves with great reinforcement of rules and precepts. Also these precepts must)they be saved at the cost of child development. And we end up with this seemingly paradoxical situation; parents who are proud of their gifted child, and even admire him, are driven by their own distress to repel, bully, even destroy, precisely what is best in him, because more authentic.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40565
Each child has his first ideas of evil in a very concrete way, according to the prohibitions, taboos and fears of his father's home. He will have to travel a long way to free himself from it, discover in him his own "Evil" and live it no longer as "depravity", the "bad", - because instinctive - but as a latent, understandable reaction to wounds that he had to repress as a child. once he is an adult, he has the opportunity to discover its causes and to free himself from this latency.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40566
[In Hermann Hesse's eyes], "Evil" is neither hatred nor cruelty, but curious gimmicks like drinking in cabaret. This specific conception of evil, little Hesse borrowed it from his father's home. That is why everything that takes place after the coming-in-law of the god Abraxas (who had the task of "reconciling the divine element and the demonic element" seems strange to us and no longer touches us.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40567
Many of us are aware of this situation. This idealizing painting of such a "pure" house is no stranger to us either, and it reflects both the childlike vision and the hidden cruelty of this style of education that is well known to us.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40568
Having theoretical knowledge is important. However, the theory should not have a depressive function for the therapist. It must not become the successor of the severe parents who want to control everything.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40569
It is not uncommon for the therapist to allow himself to protect his own superiority by hiding behind theories in the face of a patient's contemptuous attitude. However, the true Self of the patient will not visit him in this installment. He will hide from him as he once hid from the horrified glances of his mother.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40570
A mother cannot respect her child until she feels how humiliating a simple ironic remark, intended to mask her own lack of self-confidence, can be for him. But she cannot feel how humiliated, despised and devalued her child feels before her if she herself has never consciously experienced these feelings and has sought to defend herself by irony.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40571
In an article on San-Pauli, Hamburg's hot district, published in Stern magazine on June 8, 1878, I noted the following sentence; "You feel the male dream, as seductive as it is absurd, of being cajoled by women as an infant, while reigning over them like a pasha." This "male dream" is not only not absurd, but takes its source in the most authentic and legitimate need of the infant. Our world would certainly be different if most infants were lucky enough to be able to dispose of their era as a pasha and to be cajoled by it, without having to deal prematurely with their needs.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40572
It is very impressive to see that, very often, pseudo-pulse sexual conduct disappears when the patient begins to live his feelings and perceive his true impulse desires.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40573
It is very clear what anointed we risk getting into when we try to explain to a patient impulse conflicts that, since his earliest childhood, he has been trained not to feel. How could impulse desires and conflicts be experienced, if feelings are absent? What do they mean without anger, jealousy, love, feelings of abandonment and loneliness?

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40574
Nothing can reveal to us the hidden drama of the unconscious mother-child relationship (in bonding's absence), than the sight of the destructive force of repetition compulsion and the perception of its silent, unconscious message in the reviviscence of the old drama.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40575
This feeling of guilt, the overwhelming feeling of not having met the expectations of the parents, many people keep it their whole life. Although they know intellectually that a child is not having to meet the needs of his parents, this feeling of guilt is stronger. It resists all arguments, for it has its roots in the very dawn of life and draws its intensity and stubbornness from it.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40576
It was only when the reproaches, addressed first to me, and then to the mother, came that she could feel the immense despair left in her by her thirst never satisfied with contact. Her repressed memories of this distant and distant mother had maintained in her the painful feeling that a wall separated her from other humans. The violent reproaches also allowed, in the end, the disappearance of the repetition compulsion that led her to always indulge in an incomprehensible partner and live as desperately dependent on him.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40577
If we want to avoid the unconscious rape of the child and its discrimination, the first thing to do and to become aware of it. Raising awareness of the fine and subtle forms of humiliation of a child is the only way to help us gain the respect for the child that the child needs from the first day of life in order to develop psychically. There are different ways to achieve this awareness: for example, observing situations where unknown children find themselves trying to put themselves in their place, and, above all, learning to show empathy for one's own destiny.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40578
... the behaviour of drug addicts. Beings who, in their childhood, have had to successfully suppress their very intense feelings, often try to regain - at least for a brief moment - the lost intensity of 'lived experience, by means of drugs or alcohol [...].

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40579
She once said to me, "I find myself as ridiculous as if I had spoken to a wall and waited for him to answer me. Like a stupid kid. I asked myself, "Would you go back to the sight of a child who has to put his sentence in a wall, because he has no one else?" The desperate sobs that entered my question opened up to my patient access to a part of her true past, which had been marked by infinite loneliness. At the same time, she was finally freed from her torturers and destructive feelings of shame.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40594
If we throw away the key to understanding our lives, the sources of depression - such as suffering, illness and healing - will necessarily remain hidden from us.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40595
Although, according to its external manifestations, depression is diametrically opposed to grandiosity, and that, in a way, this state of mood takes more account of the tragedy of the loss of the Self, they have many common traits. One can cite the following: 1) A false-Self that led to the loss of the true Self. 2) The fragility of self-esteem, which is not rooted in one's personal feelings and will, is leaving behind the possibility of realizing the false self. 3) Perfectionism. 4) The denial of despised feelings. 5) Human relationships that are exploitation. 6) A great fear of the loss of love, resulting in a pronounced willingness to adapt. 7) Aggressive impulses out of context. 8) A great susceptibility. 9) A tendency towards feelings of shame and guilt. 10) Continuous anxiety and agitation.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40596
... the old wound cannot heal as long as it is denied through delusion, that is, the intoxication of success. Depression leads to the lips of this wound, but only the mourning of what we have missed, of what we have missed" at the decisive moment, can lead to its true healing.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40605
The true Self cannot communicate because it has not developed, having remained unconscious, locked up in an inner prison. The use of jailers does not promote development. It is only after liberation that the Self begins to express itself, to grow and to develop its creativity. And where once there existed only this dreaded emptiness or agonizing fantasies of grandeur, a spring of life, of unexpected wealth, arises. It's not a home trip - because we've never had one. It's finding your home.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40606
The unconscious, repressed memories that compel us to hide our true Self from ourselves are the successors of our parents. And this is how, to our solitude in the father's house, an inner isolation will follow.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40607
To defend fighting for the feeling of abandonment experienced in early childhood, the adult has a large number of mechanisms. Apart from mere denial, we most often find the perpetual struggle, exhausting, to satisfy the repressed needs, and since then perverted, with the help of symbols: drugs, groups, cults of all kinds, perversions. Intellectualizations are also common, as they offer very reliable protection, which can however have fatal effects if the body - as is the case in serious diseases - takes full control [...].

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40608
During my twenty years of therapeutic activity, I have seen myself repeatedly confronted with a type of child's destiny that seems to me characteristic of individuals working in a profession of helping others.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40609
According to the prevailing opinion, these individuals - who were the pride of their parents - should have a strong and stable self-awareness. But it is quite the opposite; Everything they do, they do well, even brilliantly, we admire and envy them, they go from success to success in all that seems important to them, but all this is useless. In the background awaits depression, the feeling of emptiness, of alienation. As soon as the rogue of "grandiosity" is lacking, they do not feel "the champion", not unquestionably the superstar, or they suddenly feel that they have failed in some ideal image of their self, their lives seem meaningless to them. They are then the victim of anxiety attacks, tortured by intense feelings, indignity and guilt. What are the reasons for such profound unrest in such rich personalities?

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40610
.. traumatic events of all childhood remain in darkness? Darkness where the keys to understanding the rest of life are also hidden.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

#40611
For example, the refoulement of the brutal abuses they once "were victims of causes many individuals to destroy the lives of others and their own, to burn down the homes of immigrants, to retaliate - and above all the market to christen all these acts "patriotism" - so as not to see their own truth and not to feel the despair of the martyred child.

Alice Miller
(The future of the drama of the gifted child)

Seth Messenger : Alice Miller's quotes

Alice Miller said :