“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”
Alice Miller“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of our truth about the unique history of our childhood.”
Alice Miller“Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.”
Alice Miller“For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.”
Alice Miller“I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self“Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self“Today it is hardly possible for any group to remain so isolated from others who have different values. Therefore it is necessary today for the individual to find support within himself. . . This strength within himself—through access to his own real needs and feelings and the possibility of expressing them—thus becomes crucially important for him on the one hand, and on the other made enormously more difficult through living in contact with various different value systems. These factors can probably explain the rapid increase of depression in our time and also the general fascination with various groups.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self“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?”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self“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.“The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden”
what is forbidden is to write about it.