165 Quotes by Alice Miller

Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.

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.

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.

All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.

The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.

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.

Disregard for those who are smaller and weaker is this the best defense against a breakthrough of one's own feelings of helplessness: it is an expression of this split-off weakness. The strong person who- because he has experienced it- knows the he, too, carries this weakness within himself does not need to demonstrate his strength through contempt.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?