Quotes from Alice Miller

people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built up around them.

The feminist movement will forfeit none of its strength if it finally admits that mothers also abuse their children. Only the truth, even the most uncomfortable, endows a movement with the strength to change society, not the denial of the truth.

Accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the "as-if personality." This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self.

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.

A patient with "antennae" for his therapist's unconscious will react promptly. If he senses that it is important to his therapist to have patients who soon become autonomous and behave with self-confidence, he will quickly feel himself autonomous and react accordingly.

Consciously experiencing our legitimate emotions is liberating, not just because of the discharge of long-held tensions in the body but above all because it opens our eyes to reality (both past and present) and frees us of lies and illusions

As the sociologist Lucien Lombardo wrote in his introduction to a chapter of my recent book, The Truth Will Set You Free, "childhood is not the shortest age in our life but rather the longest because it stays with us until our death.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the 'smallest', but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?

It is not only the "beautiful," "good," and pleasant feelings that make us really alive, deepen our existence, and give us crucial insight, but often precisely the unacceptable and unadapted ones from which we would prefer to escape: helplessness, shame, envy, jealousy, confusion, rage, and grief. These feelings can be experienced in therapy. When they are understood

Six years after I began to paint I wrote my first three books in three years (The Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware), in which I tried to explain the connections between denied suffering in childhood and adult violence.

To recognize and integrate something monstrous from our collective past as a society requires considerable time, just as it does on the individual level, in therapy. To rush the process may mean that the mechanisms of denial are further strengthened. We still need our illusions, our crutches, as we confront a new and painful aspect of the truth on our journey toward a complete perception of the child's situation.

If we suppress them, feelings can indeed hide themselves from the conscious mind, but they frequently resurface in the form of bodily symptoms, which conceal their real content and intensity, making it much more difficult to deal with them than it would be if they were admitted to consciousness.

Today, I believe that to mistreat children as I was mistreated—to punish them, to forbid them to weep, to speak, to defend themselves, to revolt against brutal treatment—is the greatest crime that there is. It is a crime to discipline children so much that they become blind, dumb, lifeless and then, later, to deny the whole thing. No wonder such children would later as doctors rather subject others to electroshock treatment than confront the repressed misery of their past.

There was no way that he could repair the damage done to their past; it was a task completely beyond his means. The path he chose–shutting himself off–was perhaps the only way of putting together a life for himself and avoiding damage from his mother's projections.

Ultimately, though, what was painfully lacking in childhood cannot be made good by repression and the fulfillment of substitute gratifications. Even when the acquisition of power fuels the illusion, allowing it to swell to staggering proportions, the number of victims will always be too small to sate the deadly, unconscious rage of the child that was prevented from living.

But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones.

In therapy Katya realized how much her relationship with her son had been burdened by the shadows of her childhood, and memories of her mother came back to her more and more clearly, memories of the way she had refused to relate to her eldest daughter. Katya was now able to feel her infant needs and express them in a diary, from which her friend sent me an excerpt after Katya's death:

With the infallibility of a sleepwalker, she will seek out those who, like her parents (though for different reasons), certainly cannot understand her. Because of her blindness caused by repression, she will try to make herself understandable to precisely these people—trying to make possible what cannot be.

The path to adulthood lies not in tolerance for the cruelties we have been exposed to but in the realization of our own truth and the development of empathy for the maltreated child. It lies in the appreciation of the way in which cruelties have handicapped our whole

To me, blindness is the fear of facts—facts that may cause us anger. But it is precisely the experience and expression of justifiable anger that gives us the courage to go forward.

They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency actively fosters the hatred that, though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless.

At the very first you were quite obviously and incomprehensibly indifferent toward me and probably for this reason seemed familiar.

We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless.

Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear. The connection can be deciphered only when the intense emotions have been experienced in therapy and successfully linked with their original situation.*