Quote

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.

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
Wish
Latter
Curtailment
Cannot
Develop
Inhibiting
Life
Rules
Insofar
Limits
Subjected
Discipline
Confined
Activity
Wishes
Least
Vital
Within
Specific

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.
Alice Miller
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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
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Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this, they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grew out of the experience of love.
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The only possible recourse a baby has when his screams are ignored is to repress his distress, which is tantamount to mutilating his soul, for the result is an interference with his ability to feel, to be aware, and to remember.
Alice Miller
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Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her and to be mirrored by her.
Alice Miller
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You gotta keep that in check - you got to.
Alice Miller
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The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center - the central actor - in his own activity.
Alice Miller
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Society chooses to disregard the mistreatment of children, judging it to be altogether normal because it is so commonplace.
Alice Miller
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It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.
Alice Miller
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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
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Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.
Alice Miller
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I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.
Alice Miller
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The art of not experiencing feelings. A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.
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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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.
Alice Miller
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The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.
Alice Miller
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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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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.
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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That probably greatest of narcissistic wounds -- not to have been loved just as one truly was -- cannot heal without the work of mourning.
Alice Miller