Quote

The commandment to refrain from placing blame on our parents, deeply imprinted in us by our upbringing, skillfully performs the function of hiding essential truths from us.

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
Deeply
Performs
Essential
Commandment
Essentials
Placing
Blame
Refrain
Function
Upbringing
Parents
Commandments
Parent
Hiding
Skillfully
Truth
Truths
Imprinted

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Courage can be just as infectious as fear.
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Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
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The father receives his power from God (and from his own father). The teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.
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Today I should not be identified with any kind of regressive therapy.
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Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.
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Problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience.
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You gotta keep that in check - you got to.
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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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Empathy grows as we learn.
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Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course - because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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