Quotes from Alice Miller

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.

I want to know who I am, why I was born, why right now, why here in Germany, why as the child of my parents, who understand nothing about me. Why am I alive? What am I doing here? I'm glad that since those exchanges with Nina I don't have to hide all these questions behind my anorexia. I want to look for a way of finding answers to my questions and of living in peace with my own self. November 3, 1997

As she never wanted me to be the way I really was, I had to actively conceal my authentic feelings from her.

How alarmed that same courageous Friedrich von Schiller would have been if someone had said to him, "You don't need to honor your father. People who have done you such harm do not deserve your love or respect, even if they are your parents. The price you pay for such filial devotion is appalling, the terrible physical torments you repeatedly go through. You can free yourself of them if you no longer obey the Fourth Commandment." What would Schiller have said to that?

However, it may also be true that there is still a small, unintegrated child living within, whose panic and fear have never been admitted, never consciously experienced, and thus direct themselves at others. These fears can suddenly assail us without apparent reason and cause us to panic. Unconscious fear of one's father or mother can last for decades if it has not been consciously experienced in the company of an enlightened witness.

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. . .

The body would become aware of this sooner or later, and no amount of fine-sounding words would be able to deceive it for long.

Had he made the entire world his victim, he still would not have been able to banish his introjected father from his bedroom, for once own unconscious cannot be destroyed by destroying the world.

It has now been proved that though repression may be crucial for a child, it should not necessarily be the fate of adults. A small child's dependency on her parents, her trust in them, her longing to love and be loved, are limitless. To exploit this dependency, to deceive a child in her longing, confuse her, and then proceed to sell this as child rearing is a criminal act—a criminal act committed hourly and daily out of ignorance, indifference, and the refusal to give up such behavior.

The contents of the unconscious remain unchanged and timeless. It is only as these contents become conscious that change can begin.

Previously, Woolf attributed her depressive states to her terrible, humiliating experiences of sexual molestation. But if she followed Freud's theories, then there had to be other explanations. Perhaps her memories were distorted, not to say false; perhaps they were a reflection not of actual experience but of the projection of her own desires. Perhaps, in short, the whole business had been a product of her imagination.2 I

Sense such humiliation, combined with prohibiting a child's verbal expression, is a constant and universally encountered factor in child-rearing, the influence of this factor in the child's later development is easily overlooked.

His asthma was an expression of this dilemma: "I breathe in so much air but I must not breathe it out again, everything she gives me must be good for me, even if it stifles me." A look back at Proust's childhood casts light on the origins of this tragedy. It explains why he was inextricably bound up with his mother for so long and could not free himself of her influence, although he undoubtedly suffered as a result. Proust

Empathizing with a child's unhappy beginnings does not imply exoneration of the cruel acts he later commits. (This is as true for Alois Hitler as it is for Adolf.)

Those who persecute others are warding of knowledge of their own fate as victims.

So there he lay in his bed, waiting for the token of love he so desperately desired. But what he received from his mother instead were constant admonitions to be well-mannered, well-adjusted, "normal." Later

Like the youthful Nietzsche, he was assailed by all kinds of illnesses, and he was virtually unable to concentrate.

Every criminal was humiliated, neglected, or abused in childhood, but few of them can admit to it. Many genuinely do not know that they were. Thus denial gets in the way of statistical surveys based on the question-and-answer method, none of which will have any practical prophylactic effect as long as our eyes and ears remain closed to the issues posed by childhood.

As adults, we will hate only if we remain trapped in a situation in which we cannot give free expression to our feelings. It is this dependency that makes us start to hate. As soon as we break that dependency (which as adults we can normally do, unless we are prisoners of some totalitarian regime), as soon as we free ourselves from that slavery, then we will no longer hate.

Because the victims are "only children," their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years' time these children will be adults who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children.

Like the youthful Nietzsche, he was assailed by all kinds of illnesses, and he was virtually unable to concentrate. He spent weeks at a time in the infirmary, and finally ended up among the pupils with the poorest grades.

No one realized that it was the inhuman and absurd discipline imposed on him at this boarding school, where he spent eight years of his life, that completely exhausted his physical and mental energies.

Consciously experiencing one's own victimisation instead of trying to ward it off provides protection against sadism; i.e., the compulsion to torment and humiliate others.

What these adults need then is an enlightened witness who can accompany them on the road to their own truth, help them embark on a process in the course of which they will finally permit themselves the always-wanted but always-denied things: trust, respect, and love for themselves. We must abandon the expectation that someday the parents will give us what they withheld in childhood. This