165 Quotes by Alice Miller

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 persons. In any case, I don’t know of a single person who enjoyed this respect as a child and then as an adult had the need to put other human beings to death.

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.

The grandiose person is never really free; first, because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect.

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.

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.

A person is not likely to conceive something monstrous if he does not know it somehow or other from experience. We simply tend to refuse to take a child’s suffering seriously enough.

Everyone who has been beaten as a child is susceptible to fear; everyone who was deprived of love as a child will long for it, sometimes their whole lives. This longing contains a whole bundle of expectations, and those expectations, coupled with the fear we have referred to, form an excellent medium in which the Fourth Commandment can thrive. It represents the power of adults over children, and it’s reflected unmistakably in all the religions of the world.

We discover that we are no longer compelled to follow the former pattern of disappointment, suppression of pain, and depression, since we now have another possibility of dealing with disappointment: namely, experiencing the pain. In this way we at last gain access to our earlier experiences – to the parts of ourselves and our fate that were previously hidden from us.

If Bob had been able as a child to express his disappointment with his mother – to experience his rage and anger – he could have stayed fully alive. But that would have led to the loss of his mother’s love, and that, for a child, can mean the same as death. So he “killed” his anger, and with it a part of himself, in order to preserve the love of his mother.