Quotes from Alice Miller

And this succeeded so completely because children want to love their parents and prefer not to look the truth in the face. The truth is too awful for these children to bear, so they avert their eyes. But the body remembers everything, and as adults those children unconsciously and automatically rehearse their parents' sadism on their own children, on their subjects or employees, on everyone dependent on them.

If an adult has not developed and mind of his own, then he will find himself at the mercy of the authorities for better or worse, just as an infant finds itself at the mercy of its parents. Saying no to those more powerful will always seem to threatening to him.

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; now go to your room and play nicely")

individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naïveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves

We admire people who oppose the regime in totalitarian country and think they have courage or a strong moral sense or have remained true to their principles and the like. We may also smile at their naïveté, thinking, Don't they realise that their words are of no use at all against this oppressive power? That they will hath to pay dearly for their protest?

Porque uno está libre de depresiones cuando la autoestima arraiga en la autenticidad de los sentimientos propios y no en la posesión de determinadas cualidades.

But that can only be possible when mothers and fathers no longer unconsciously assume that their children have been brought into the world to alleviate the frustrations and repair the damage they have suffered in their own lives.

If I as a helpless child was abused and am not allowed to see this, I will abuse other helpless creatures without realizing what I am doing. I will also refuse to read books on abuse, or I won't want to understand them because, if I did, I would have to feel the tragedy of my childhood and the pain of having been misled at such an early age.

Adolescents' heroic willingness to fight one another in wars and (just as life is beginning!) to die for someone else's cause may be a result of the fact that during puberty the warded-off hatred from early childhood becomes really intensified. Adolescents can divert this hatred from their parents if they are given a clear-cut enemy whom they are permitted to hate freely and with impunity.

But this awakening of sensitivity for the martyrdom of childhood has far-reaching consequences: Suddenly it is no longer possible to regard cruelty, perversion, and crime as a form of upbringing for our own good; we are forced to come to a decision and stop finding excuses for crime.

True adulthood would mean no longer denying the truth. It would mean feeling the repressed suffering, consciously acknowledging the story remembered by the body at an emotional level, and integrating that story instead of repressing it.

The crucial significance of bonding has only recently been proved scientifically. One hopes that it will soon be taken into account in practice, not only in a few select maternity hospitals but in larger hospitals as well, so that everyone will benefit from it. A woman who has experienced bonding with her child will be in less danger of mistreating him and will be in a better position to protect him from mistreatment by the father and other caregivers, such as teachers and babysitters.

This is an astounding statement, because I know of literally no one who suffers from psychic symptoms and seeks treatment for them without having at least been beaten and humiliated in childhood.

Once we realize the immense amount of energy children can summon up in order to survive cruelty and extreme sadism, things suddenly start looking more optimistic. Then it is easy to imagine that our world could be a much better one if those children (like Rimbaud, Schiller, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche) could expend their almost limitless energies on other, more productive ends than merely fighting for their own survival.

The life-saving function of repression in childhood is transformed in adulthood into a life-destroying force.

In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood, manifested as the total alienation from the self in the adult.

Only if young people are allowed to know exactly what happened and why, if they no longer allow themselves to be deflected in their curiosity and do not fear the truth, can they free themselves from the burden of their forefathers' blindness. Such young people will certainly not condone the production of poisoned gas.

When children are born, what they need most from their parents is love, by which I mean affection, attention, care, protection, kindness, and the willingness to communicate.

In contrast, there are those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who do suffer from severe depression. For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.

The older we get, the more difficult it is to find other people who can give us the love our parents denied us. But the body's expectations do not slacken with age—quite the contrary! They are merely directed at others, usually our own children and grandchildren. The only way out of this dilemma is to become aware of these mechanisms and to identify the reality of our own childhood by counteracting the processes of repression and denial.

For it is easier to see oneself as a criminal than to know and feel that one was, and is, an innocent victim who must be prepared at all times for torture and persecution. 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.

The grandiose person is never really free; first, because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.

Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected.

Accordingly, he came to believe that his immediate environment was the world itself.