Top 100 Alice Miller Quotes
#1. Susan had decided to sit by the pool at the hotel with a copy of a book by Alice Miller called The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Robert B. Parker
#2. 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
Janae B. Weinhold
#3. One is free from depression," writes Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child, "when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one's own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.
John Bradshaw
#4. I think Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child is one of the books read by nearly every therapist. Everyone's jaw drops when they read Miller's dead-on description of why we became therapists. (...) I wish more people were familiar with her work.
Ryan Howes
#5. Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.
Alice Miller
#6. 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
#7. There are people who have benefited from therapy without being confronted with the past at all.
Alice Miller
#9. 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
#10. When a woman like that whom I've seen so much, All of a sudden drops out of touch; Is always busy and never can, Spare you a moment, it means a man.
Alice Duer Miller
#11. Good manners are the techniques of expressing consideration for the feelings of others.
Alice Duer Miller
#12. What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.
Alice Miller
#14. Rare indeed is the nature that does not become a little more intense when its own affairs come under discussion.
Alice Duer Miller
#15. The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.
Alice Miller
#16. Men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this ...
Alice Duer Miller
#17. Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.
Alice Miller
#18. If not consciously acknowledged and mourned, uncertainty about one's descent can cause great anxiety and unrest, all the more so if, as in Alois's case, it is linked with an ominous rumor that can neither be proven nor completely refuted
Alice Miller
#19. Not to take one's own suffering seriously, to make light of it or even to laugh at it, is considered good manners in our culture.
Alice Miller
#20. They make other nations seem pale and flighty,
But they do think England is God almighty,
And you must remind them now and then
That other countries breed other men.
Alice Duer Miller
#21. A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.
Alice Miller
#22. Love will not always linger longest with those who hold it in too clenched a fist.
Alice Duer Miller
#23. Courage can be just as infectious as fear.
Alice Miller
#24. 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
#25. People who deal in truth themselves recognize it when they hear it, just as people who deal in diamonds recognize a real stone when they see it.
Alice Duer Miller
#26. An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.
Alice Miller
#27. FREQUENTLY, PHYSICAL ILLNESSES are the body's response to permanent disregard of its vital functions. One of our most vital functions is an ability to listen to the true story of our own lives.
Alice Miller
#28. And now too late, we see these things are one:
The art is sacrifice and self-control
And who loves beauty must be stern of soul.
Alice Duer Miller
#29. 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
#30. Today I should not be identified with any kind of regressive therapy.
Alice Miller
#31. In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual "wisdom," we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.
Alice Miller
#32. SAYING AND CONCEALING For I would prefer to have these attacks and please you, rather than displease you and not have them. - Marcel Proust in a letter to his mother
Alice Miller
#33. The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. we can repair ourselves and gain our lost integrity by choosing to look more honestly at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing that knowledge closer to our awareness.
Alice Miller
#34. I sincerely believe that we not only have the right to know what is good and what is evil; we have the duty to acquire that knowledge if we hope to assume responsibility for our own lives and those of our children. Only by knowing the truth can we be set free.
Alice Miller
#35. The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.
Alice Miller
#36. The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.
Alice Miller
#37. It's been my experience, Charlotte, that the crisis never comes as or when you expect.
Alice Duer Miller
#38. We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.
Alice Miller
#39. It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublime
When you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time.
Alice Duer Miller
#40. 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.
Alice Miller
#41. It is precisely because a child's feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.
Alice Miller
#42. 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
#43. A system of morality tells us what to do and what not to do, but it cannot tell us what we should feel. Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated.
Alice Miller
#44. Silences, as every observer knows, have strange characteristics all their own - passionate silences, and hateful silences, and silences full of friendly, purring content.
Alice Duer Miller
#45. 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
#48. Only the mourning for what one has missed at the crucial time can lead to real healing.
Alice Miller
#49. If it's painful for you to criticize your friends, you're safe in doing it; if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
Alice Duer Miller
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Hate is perhaps the most dynamic of all emotions - fear may immobilize, love may stay the hand, but hate urges to action ...
Alice Duer Miller
#53. They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were,
Alice Miller
#54. A human being born into a cold, indifferent world will regard his situation as the only possible one.
Alice Miller
#55. Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse.
Alice Miller
#56. 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
#57. We are still barely conscious of how harmful it is to treat children in a degrading manner. Treating them with respect and recognizing the consequences of their being humiliated are by no means intellectual matters; otherwise, their importance would long since have been generally recognized.
Alice Miller
#58. she belittles her feelings to protect herself, and either does not become aware of them at all, or does so only several days after they have already passed.
Alice Miller
#59. 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
#61. 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
#62. Mother, what is a Feminist?"
"A feminist, my daughter,
Is any woman now who cares
To think about her own affairs
As men don't think she oughter.
Alice Duer Miller
#63. 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
#64. they are aware of having been misunderstood as children, they feel that the fault lay with them and with their inability to express themselves appropriately.
Alice Miller
#65. It is always difficult for a woman to be grateful for a form of chivalry that seems to be based on the premise that she is a moron.
Alice Duer Miller
#66. Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing.
Alice Miller
#67. Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.
Alice Miller
#68. 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
#69. If a mother respects both herself and her child from his very first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others.
Alice Miller
#70. 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.
Alice Miller
#71. 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
#72. Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.
Alice Miller
#73. It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion - something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.
Alice Miller
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. If we do not work on all three levels
body, feeling, mind
the symptoms of our distress will keep returning, as the body goes on repeating the story stored in its cells until it is finally listened to and understood.
Alice Miller
#78. Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.
Alice Miller
#79. Conversation is a partnership, not a relation of master and slave, as most people try to make it.
Alice Duer Miller
#80. 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
#81. Cruelty is the opposite of love, and its traumatic effect, far from being reduced, is actually reinforced if it is presented as a sign of love.
Alice Miller
#82. We produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.
Alice Miller
#83. Tragic and painful state of being separated from his true self, to which doctors refer offhandedly as depression.
Alice Miller
#84. 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
#85. One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.
Alice Miller
#86. When men in Congress come to blows at somemthing someone said,
I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red;
But if two women disagree, with very little noise,
It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise.
Alice Duer Miller
#87. We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.
Alice Miller
#88. Problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience ...
Alice Miller
#89. Society chooses to disregard the mistreatment of children, judging it to be altogether normal because it is so commonplace.
Alice Miller
#90. The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.
Alice Miller
#91. As soon as he is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his natural growth will be violently interrupted.
Alice Miller
#92. We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it.
Alice Miller
#93. Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.
Alice Miller
#94. If it is very painful for you to criticize your friends, you are safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that is the time to hold your tongue
Alice Miller
#95. You gotta keep that in check - you got to.
Alice Miller
#96. Someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, but which we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to.
Alice Miller
#97. 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
#98. In a world where England is finished and dead: I do not wish to live.
Alice Duer Miller
#99. There, little girl, don't read,
You're fond of your books, I know,
But Brother might mope
If he had no hope
Of getting ahead of you.
It's dull for a boy who cannot lead.
There, little girl, don't read.
Alice Duer Miller
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