Quotes from Alice Miller

No, we need precisely the opposite: a partial companion, someone who can share with us the horror and indignation that is bound to arise when our emotions gradually reveal to her, and to us, how the little child suffered, what it went through all alone when body and soul were fighting for years on end to preserve a life threatened by constant danger.

Compulsive substance addiction can have disastrous effects because it blocks off the path to genuine emotions and feelings. The drug can supply feelings of euphoria that reanimate the creativity scotched by a cruel upbringing. But the body will not tolerate this self-alienation for the duration of an entire life.

If a mother can make it clear to a child that at that particular moment when she slapped him her love for him deserted her and she was dominated by other feelings that had nothing to do with the child, the child can keep a clear head, feel respected, and not be disoriented in his relationship to his mother.

The point is that the fatigue characteristic of such depression reasserts itself every time we repress strong emotions, play down the memories stored in the body, and refuse them the attention they clamor for.

Enforced love is not love. All it can lead to is a sham relationship without any genuine communication, a pretense of warmth and cordiality that does not really exist, a false avowal of affection designed to mask resentment or possibly even hatred.

Accordingly, I believe that preaching forgiveness is not only hypocritical and futile but also actively dangerous. It masks the compulsion to repeat.

People brought up cruelly (and unfortunately that is still the majority) willingly submit to dictators and cheer them on when they supply them with an enemy they can execrate.

The greater the panic-stricken fear of the repressed facts, of the return of the repressed, the more destructively and dangerously fanaticism rages. Whether it appears in religious or political form is not important; the one can easily turn into the other, as we can constantly witness today. What matters is the denial of crucial facts—and all orthodoxies have this characteristic in common.

Even then Katya remained blind to the fact that as an adult she had ways of escaping her dilemma, that she could have separated from her husband.

Frequently, parents withhold such communication from the child, not because they are in any way malevolent but because they themselves never experienced such a token of affection in childhood and consequently do not know that such a thing exists. They can learn to communicate meaningfully with their children, but only if those children have the full support of a therapist who has shaken off the influence of poisonous pedagogy and is totally and unreservedly on the children's side.

But a person who is no longer a child and has the courage to mature by wanting to see the truth must be capable of clearly and unequivocally rejecting the cruelty he or she suffered. Only then will he or she refuse to contribute to the success of evil.

That balloon flew up very high in a good wind but was suddenly punctured and soon lay like a little rag on the ground, for nothing genuine that could have given inner strength and support had ever been developed.

The child's dependence on his or her parents' love also makes it impossible in later years to recognize these traumatizations, which often remain hidden behind the early idealization of the parents for the rest of the child's life.

To free themselves of this compulsion they need to be able to share their feelings with someone—they need the experience of being listened to, understood, taken seriously, of no longer having to hide. Only then will they know that this is the nourishment they have been searching for all their lives.

Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel and constantly do their best not to feel what they forbid themselves to feel will ultimately fall ill—unless, that is, they leave it to their children to pick up the check by projecting onto them the emotions they cannot admit to themselves.

Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self.

As a child he was deprived of genuine communication. He suffered unspeakably from this deficiency, and all his works describe nothing other than miscommunication, be it The Castle, The Trial, or The Metamorphosis. In all these novels and stories the questions are never heard—they are answered with strange distortions, and the central figures are totally isolated, totally incapable of getting someone to listen.

To free them from this isolation—the feeling of being the sole guardian of a guilty secret—parents would need to summon up the courage to admit their errors to their children. This would change the whole situation. In calm and collected conversation with their children they might say something like this:

One of our most vital functions is an ability to listen to the true story of our own lives. Accordingly, the central issue in this book is the conflict between the things we feel—the things our bodies register—and the things we think we ought to feel so as to comply with moral norms and standards we have internalized at a very early age.

Then, however, comes 'the work of forgiveness, which is apparently necessary if one is to heal. Many young people who have AIDS or are drug-addicted die in the wake of their effort to forgive so much. What they do not realize is that they are trying to keep the repression of their childhood intact.

In the tradition we are dealing with, it was considered obstinacy and was therefore frowned upon to have a will and mind of one's own. It is easy to understand that an intelligent child would want to escape punishments devised for those possessing these traits and that he or she could do so without any difficulty. What the child didn't realize was that escape came at a high price.

The true source of her illness was the unfulfilled longing for communication, the deprivation of genuine contact with her parents and boyfriend. Her refusal to eat was the sign of this deficiency. Ultimately her recovery was possible because Anita realized that there were people who could and did understand her.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.

People who delegate their own responsibility to higher powers are willfully ignoring what the facts tell them. They don't care about the truth. They want to be left in peace. Goodness they attribute to God, evil to the devil or their children's innate wickedness.