The Drama of the Gifted Child - the Search for the True Self
Alice Miller
Revised Edition 1997 ─ the revised edition is important
Alice Miller website: https://www.alice-miller.com/en/
Arguably,
one of the most important books of the last century.
“Experience has taught us
that we have only one weapon in the enduring struggle against mental illness;
the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our
childhood.” pg. 1 (opening sentence)
“The repression of brutal
abuse experienced during during childhood drives many people to destroy their
lives and the lives of others.” pg. 2
“Their (the child who
was talented and a high achiever, and, by extension, ANY child) access to
the emotional world of their own childhood, however, is impaired─characterized
by a lack of respect, a compulsion to control and manipulate, and a demand for
achievement.” pg. 6
“The child’s needs for
respect, echoing, understanding, sympathy, and mirroring have had to be
repressed, with several serious consequences. One such consequence is the
person’s inability to experience consciously certain feelings of his own (such
as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, or anxiety), either in childhood
or later in adulthood.” pg. 9
”These people have all
developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for 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 risks losing the
mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will
repress her emotions. … She will fail to experience them at all but they will
nevertheless stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can
be triggered by a later event.” pgs. 9-10 (PTSD)
“Several mechanisms can be
recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. In addition to
simple denial, intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since
it is a defense mechanism of great power. It can have disastrous results,
however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body.” pg.11
“Accomodation to parental
needs often (but not always) leads to the “as if” personality.” This person
develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected off him and fuses
so completely with what he reveals that no one could scarcely know how much
more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and
differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably
this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness,
for the emptiness is real. … The integrity of the child was injured when all
that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off.” pgs. 11-12
“So he killed his anger,
and with it a part of himself, in order to preserve the love of his mother. (?He
killed his love in order to preserve the love of his mother?) … The
difficulties inherent in experiencing and developing one’s own emotions lead to
mutual dependency, which prevents individuation. Both parties have an interest
in bond permanence…” pg. 13
“An adult can be fully
aware of his feelings only if he had caring parents and caregivers. People who
were abused or neglected in childhood are missing this capacity and are
therefore never overtaken by unexpected emotions. They will admit only those
feelings that are accepted and approved by their inner censor, who is their
parent’s heir.
Depression and a sense of
inner emptiness are the price they must pay for this control. The true self
cannot communicate because it has remained unconscious, and therefore
undeveloped, in its inner prison. The company of prison warders does not
encourage lively development. It is only after it is liberated that the self
begins to be articulate, to grow, and to develop its creativity. 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. This is the creation of home.” pgs.
18-19
“When he presents material
that fits the therapist’s knowledge, concepts, and skills─and therefore also
his expectations─the patient satisfies his therapist’s wish for approval, echo,
understanding, and for being taken seriously. In this way the therapist
exercises the same sort of unconscious manipulation as that to which he was
exposed as a child. A child can never see through unconscious manipulation. It is
like the air he breathes; he knows no other, and it appears to him to be the
only breathable air.” pg. 21
“The true opposite of
depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality─the freedom to
experience spontaneous feelings.” pg. 60
“Narcissus was in love with
his idealized picture, but neither the grandiose nor the depressive “Narcissus”
can really love himself. His passion for his false self makes impossible
not only love for others but also, despite all appearances, love for the one person
who is fully entrusted to his care: himself.” pg. 67
My
parents never received the acknowledgement I never got from them. My own quote
“Probably the greatest of
wounds─not to have been loved just as one truly was─cannot heal without the
work of mourning. It can be either more or less successfully resisted and
covered up (as in grandiosity and depression), or constantly torn open again in
the compulsion to repeat.” pg. 87
“We find a similar example
in the behavior of addicts. People who as children successfully repressed their
intense feelings often try to regain─at least for a short time─their lost
intensity of experience with the help of drugs or alcohol.” pg. 81
“Hesse, like so many gifted
children, was so difficult for his parents to bear not despite but because
of his inner riches. Often a child’s very gifts (his great intensity of
feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness─and his
ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts they have long
sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. These regulations must
then be rescued at the cost of the child’s development. All this can lead to an
apparently paradoxical situation when parents who are proud of their gifted
child and whom even admire him are forced by their own repression to reject,
suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in that child.”
pg. 101
“Oppression and the forcing
of submission do not begin in the office, factory, or political party; they
begin in the very first weeks of an infant’s life.” pg. 103
“All our lives we have
feared and struggled to ward off something that really cannot happen any
longer; it has already happened, at the very beginning of our lives while we
were completely dependent.” pg. 105
“The aim of therapy,
however, is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient both to confront
his own history and to grieve over it. The patient has to discover early
memories within himself and must become consciously aware of his parent’s
unconscious manipulation and contempt, so that he can free himself from them.
As long as he has to make do with a substitute tolerance, borrowed from his
therapist or his group, the contemptuous attitudes he inherited from his
parents will remain hidden in his unconscious, unchanged despite all his
improved intellectual knowledge and intentions. This contemptuous attitude will
show itself in the patient's human relationships and will continue to torment
him, as long as it functions in the cells of his body. The contents of the
unconscious remain unchanged and timeless. It is only as these contents become
conscious that change can begin.” pg. 106
“A child can never see
through unconscious manipulation. It is like the air he breathes; he knows no
other, and it appears to him to be the only breathable air.” pg. 21
“As the child grows up, he
cannot cease living his own truth and expressing it somewhere, perhaps in
complete secrecy. In this way a person can have adapted completely to the
demands of his surroundings and can have developed a false self, but in his
perversion of his obsessions he still allows a portion of his true self to
survive─in torment. And so the true self lives on, but underground, in the same
conditions as the child did with his disgusted mother, whose memory in the
meantime he has repressed. In his perversion and his obsessions he constantly
reenacts the same drama: A horrified mother is necessary before sexual
satisfaction is possible; orgasm … can be achieved only in a climate of self─contempt;
criticism can be expressed only in (seemingly) absurd, unaccountable, and
frightening obsessive fantasies. Pg. 89
“Mark, thirty-two, who
suffered under his perversion and constantly feared the rejection of others,
bore within himself the unconscious memory of his mother’s rejection. Without
knowing why, he was compelled to do things that his social circle and society
in general disapprove of and despise, although he feared the punishment he was
provoking. … what he was compelled to seek was not permission to use one or
another fetish, but─with the hope of a better outcome─his mother’s disgusted
and horrified eye. He looked for that response in his therapist, too,.... This
provocation of course recounted what had actually happened at the beginning of
Mark’s life. Pg. 91
“Struggling for social
acceptance of special forms of addictions, sexual and non-sexual, is one of the
many ways to avoid confrontation with our own history.” pg. 92
“The contempt for others in
grandiose, successful people always includes disrespect for their own true
selves, as their scorn implies: “Without these superior qualities of mine, a
person is completely worthless.” this means further: “Without these achievements,
these gifts, I could never be loved, would never have been loved.” Grandiosity
in the adult guarantees that the illusion continues: “I was loved.” pg. 107
My
commentary:
Whew, what an indictment of the human process! We are indelibly patterned, it would
seem, by the treatment we receive from our main caregiver, mostly in the first
3 years of life. And this patterning, Miller says, causes us to live our lives
as ‘false selves’, ajar from who we really are, ‘our True selves’.
Thinking about it as a God might though, it couldn’t be any other way FOR THE
SURVIVAL OF THE MAJORITY OF THE SPECIES. One of the finest expositions of this
is the film ‘The Other Son’ (2021), in which an Israeli and a Palestinian boy
discover they have been switched at birth, but not until they are about 12
years old. Both are so
Few
indeed are there who have escaped from this early patterning and live even
close to emancipated lives as ‘their true selves’. In the first place, it
requires, as absolutely as best as possible, a detailed knowledge of the
milieu, events, an emotional content of one’s earliest life. I am so fortunate
that when she was alive, my mother sprinkled me with lurid details of my
infancy, largely, I see now, when she recognized my massive dysfunctionalism beginning
at about puberty: overeating, drinking alcohol, destructive tobacco smoking and
wildly asocial, antisocial and destructive interpersonal relating. Simply, I
was a mess.
The
single most helpful and insightful tool has been NOT attempting to ‘inventory’
my actions and underlying beliefs and behaviors BUT inventorying MY PARENTS,
then applying or seeing how all those traits apply to MYSELF. ADULT CHILDREN OF
ALCOHOLICS has as its original inventory step, “Took a blameless and searching
inventory of OUR parents, because we had, in essence, become them.” This is
perhaps the ONLY way out of Miller’s conundrum for the ‘patient’ who
The
person attempting to inventory themselves is hopelessly caught in their own
patterning OR the patterning and inter-twining of their patterning with the
therapist.
I can’t begin to describe in words how crushed I was when I, with huge
difficulty, came to the conclusion that my parents tried to kill their own
children. I was only able to gloat over my huge realization, that I had spent a
lifetime resisting, for a few minutes when I applied that behavior pattern to
MYSELF and realized I acted out the same behavior, and worse, had the same
underlying emotional and moral makeup as my despised parents. All this is what
I resisted my whole life.
There is
a theory that ALL the important changes that have occurred to the Earth and its
inhabitants have come about not by gradual change but by meteor and asteroid
strikes─sudden and overwhelming changes: Call it quantum evolution.
Similarly, the agents of societal change are those who Miller would call
