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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

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Alice Miller
Age: 87 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 12
Died: 2010
Died: April 14
Painter
Psychologist
Sociologist
Writer
Piotrkow Trybunalski
Experience
Weapons
Truth
Childhood
Enduring
Unique
Weapon
Emotional
Illness
Taught
Acceptance
Struggle
Endure
Individual
Mental
History
Discovery

More quotes by Alice Miller

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The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves.
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We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.
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An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.
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Depression leads him close to his wounds, but only the mourning for what he has missed, missed at the crucial time, can lead to real healing.
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One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.
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We produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.
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Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.
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Courage can be just as infectious as fear.
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If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
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That probably greatest of narcissistic wounds -- not to have been loved just as one truly was -- cannot heal without the work of mourning.
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Discipline is ... life-inhibiting, is at the very least curtailment of vital activity insofar as the latter cannot develop as it wishes but is confined within specific limits and subjected to specific rules.
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The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.
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The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.
Alice Miller
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The free expression of resentment against one's parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one's true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and - with luck - reconciliation.
Alice Miller
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The abused children are alone with their suffering, not only within the family, but also within themselves. They cannot crate a place in their own soul where they could cry their beart out.
Alice Miller
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Child abuse is still sanctioned — indeed, held in high regard — in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents.
Alice Miller
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Regression to the stage of early infancy is not a suitable method in and of itself. Such a regression can only be effective if it happens in the natural course of therapy and if the client is able to maintain adult consciousness at the same time.
Alice Miller
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One of the best ways of keeping your temper in an argument, as most of us know only too well, is not to listen to anything the other person has to say.
Alice Miller
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Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.
Alice Miller
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Anyone who has ever been a mother or father and is at all honest knows from experience how difficult it can be for parents to accept certain aspects of their children. It is especially painful to have to admit this if we really love our child and want to respect his or her individuality yet are unable to do so.
Alice Miller