Quotes from Alice Miller

Is it possible, then, to free ourselves altogether from illusions? History demonstrates that they sneak in everywhere, that every life is full of them—perhaps because the truth often seems unbearable to us. And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness. In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If

The legacy of the parents is yet another generation condemned to hide from the true self while operating unconsciously under the influence of repressed memories. Unless the heir casts off his "inheritance" by becoming fully conscious of his true past, and thus of his true nature, loneliness in the parental home will necessarily be followed by an adulthood lived in emotional isolation.

At first it will be mortifying to see that she is not always good, understanding, tolerant, controlled, and, above all, without needs, for these have been the basis of her self-respect.

Gradually, she realizes how she is forced to look for distraction when she is moved, upset, or sad. (When a six-year-old's mother died, his aunt told him: "You must be brave; don't cry;

The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our life. And we often impose the most agonising suffering upon ourselves.

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of our truth about the unique history of our childhood.

The banished emotions reassert themselves and invade the body.

To escape this vicious cycle we must face the truth. And we can do it. We were humiliated children; we were the victims of our parents' ignorance, the victims of their history, of the unconscious scars with which childhood left them. We had no choice but to deny the truth.

The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they too were mistreated and were not permitted to defend themselves.

A person is not likely to conceive something monstrous if he does not know it somehow or other from experience. We simply tend to refuse to take a child's suffering seriously enough.

If the repression stays unresolved, the parents' childhood tragedy is unconsciously continued on in their children.

It is our access to the truth that can enable us to prevent such people, who yearn for the order' spawned by violence, from realizing their destructive plans. Fascism will have had its day once society ceases to deny the knowledge we already possess about the production of brutality, violence, and dehumanization in childhood and minimize its dangers. Once this has happened, it won't have a chance in this society.

Time after time, the amazing fact is uncovered that sons and daughters are unconsciously re-enacting their parents fate— all the more intensely the less precise their knowledge of it.

What is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs, and although this certainly saves his life (by securing the mother's or the father's "love") at the time, it may nevertheless prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself.

What is addiction really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood. The drug business would not nourish if there were not so many people who, in refusing to acknowledge their wounds, are in a permanent state of self-betrayal. Thus, people work to get rid of symptoms instead of searching out the cause.

No longer to be compelled to betray one's own feelings and senses, no longer to allow oneself to be deflected from the truth of facts by ideologies of any kind, is already to lend a hand in the demolition of the inhuman, destructive wall of silence—the wall that we were forced to respect as children and which has again and again resulted in fascist behavior.

What is valid for the individual is also valid for the development of a wider social consciousness. Here, too, the monstrous truth regarding the causes and consequences of child abuse and the way that violence can be bred into human beings cannot be admitted to the consciousness all at once, but must proceed slowly, step by step.

Behind manifest grandiosity, there constantly lurks depression, and behind a depressive mood there often hide unconscious (or conscious but split off) fantasies of grandiosity. In fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self.

You can drive the devil out of your garden but you will find him again in the garden of your son.

In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place.

I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.

Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive. No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love.

Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.

empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear