Quotes from Alice Miller

My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents' behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all.

Relationships based on masklike communication of this kind cannot change. They remain what they have always been: instances of mis-communication. A genuine relationship is possible only if both partners can admit their feelings, experience them and communicate them to each other without fear. It is fine and uplifting when this happens. But it is rare, because both partners' fear of giving up the accustomed façade or mask prevents any genuine exchange.

they ward off any kind of accusation from the parents who once maltreated them so severely. They do not know what that treatment has done to them, they do not know how much they have suffered from it. Above all, they do not want to know. They see it as something beneficial, something inflicted on them for their own good. Self-therapy

Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grow out of the experience of love.

If not consciously acknowledged and mourned, uncertainty about one's descent can cause great anxiety and unrest, all the more so if, as in Alois's case, it is linked with an ominous rumor that can neither be proven nor completely refuted

SAYING AND CONCEALING For I would prefer to have these attacks and please you, rather than displease you and not have them. —Marcel Proust in a letter to his mother

The answer is that we can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else. We can only be the people we are, and we cannot force our parents to love us. There are parents who can only love the mask their child wears.

The truth is that as soon as I feel well, you destroy everything until I feel bad again, because the life that gives me relief provokes you to anger…. But it is saddening that I cannot have your affection and my health at the same time."6 The

It is above all the children already born that have a right to life—a right to coexistence with adults in a world in which, with or without the help of the church, violence against children has been unequivocally outlawed. Until such legislation exists, talk of the right to life remains not only a mockery of humanity but a contribution to its destruction.

The cruelty of individuals is not something imposed on them by some mysterious agency but by their parents and other people involved in their upbringing. It takes shape in the brain of a child exposed to cruelty.

A higher being dependent on inauthentic feelings dictated by morality is strongly reminiscent of the insecurity displayed by our frustrated and disoriented parents. Such a being can be called God only by people who have never questioned their own parents or thought about their dependency on them.

The once-beaten children still living inside adults often fear being punished if they dare to truly SEE, without illusions, what their parents did to them in their first years of life. Once they understand that this danger no longer exists, they can liberate their life.

This new awareness is frequently a result of encounters with feeling individuals who have been lucky enough to grow up surrounded by love and respect, who have had a less troubled childhood, who have experienced pleasure and freedom and have thus been able to lead easier, happier lives.

They are able to listen, to identify with others; they are outgoing, concerned, and usually less prone to illusions than the figures we see them encountering. As they have experienced honesty and unconditional affection in their early years, they are better able to cope with their lives than those who are fed on illusions and later have to fight to find out the truth about themselves, like Claudia, Anika, Helga, or Lilka.

This role secured "love" for the child—that is, his parents' exploitation. He could sense that he was needed, and this need guaranteed him a measure of existential security.

AS A CHILD I had to learn to suppress my entirely natural responses to the injuries inflicted on me, responses like rage, anger, pain, and fear.

fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self that results from denial.

Even as an older child, she was not allowed to say, or even to think: "I can be sad or happy whenever anything makes me sad or happy; I don't have to look cheerful for someone else, and I don't have to suppress my distress or anxiety to fit other people's needs. I can be angry and no one will die or get a headache because of it. I can rage when you hurt me, without losing you.

It is hard enough to recognize lies for what they are if only one person, from whom we anticipate help, insists on maintaining the lie. Inbred tact and our own distress hamper us in contradicting that person. How much more difficult is it, then, to see through lies when everyone around us takes them for the truth, simply because they themselves are victims of such lies. Thus, yesterday's victims become the opinion-makers and power-brokers of tomorrow.

The strength within ourselves—through access to our own real needs and feelings and the possibility of expressing them—is crucially important for us if we want to live without depression and addiction.

And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness.

Experience has taught me that my own body is the source of all the vital information that has enabled me to achieve greater autonomy and self-confidence. Only when I allowed myself to feel the emotions pent up for so long inside me did I start extricating myself from my own past.

It's just that when we were younger we were not free enough to live our lives the way we really were.

Many of the Ten Commandments can still claim validity today. But the Fourth Commandment is diametrically opposed to the laws of psychology. It is imperative that there be general recognition of the fact that enforced "love" can do a very great deal of harm. People who were loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.