The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self QUOTES

1 " He has given ample evidence of qualities hardly any other living statesman has demonstrated to the same degree: the courage to look facts in the face and to seek flexible solutions, respect for others, give-and-take in dialog situations, absence of hypocrisy, a complete absence of grandeur in the conduct of his personal life. He has never been driven by blind self-assertion to make absurd decisions. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

2 " Hatred can survive only as long as we feel trapped in the situation of a child who has no choice, who is forced to hold out in hopeless circumstances in order to survive. As soon as the adult sees an alternative, a way out of the trap, the hatred disappears of its own accord. It is then entirely unnecessary to preach morality, forgiveness, or exercises in positive feeling. The idea that we can arouse positive feelings in ourselves by engaging in relaxation training or meditation is one that I feel to be profoundly illusory. But again and again I come across advice of this kind, coupled with the assurance that one will free oneself of one’s symptoms by forgiving one’s parents and substituting positive feelings for negative ones. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

3 " The approach adopted by Daniel Stern and the followers of John Bowlby still appears to gain only peripheral attention in psychoanalytic circles, perhaps because by his theory of initial attachment Bowlby exploded a taboo. By linking the causes of antisocial behavior with the absence of a resilient attachment to the mother, he was flying in the face of Freud’s drive theory. But my conviction is that we have to go a step further than Bowlby went. We are dealing here not just with antisocial behavior and so-called narcissistic disorders but with the inescapable realization that denying and repressing our childhood traumas means reducing our capacity to think and conspiring to erect barriers in our minds. Brain research has succeeded in uncovering the biological foundations of the denial phenomenon. But the consequences, the impact on our mentality, have not yet been adequately contemplated. No one appears to be interested in examining how insensitivity to the suffering of children–a phenomenon found the world over–is bound up with a form of mental paralysis that has its roots in childhood. As children, we learn to suppress and deny natural feelings and to believe sincerely that the cuffs and blows we receive are for our own good and do us no lasting injury. Our brains, furnished with this false information, then instruct us to raise our own children by the same methods, telling them that it is good for them just as it was good for us. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

4 " Early anxieties stored in the body can be resolved in therapy as long as their causes are not denied. Initial moves toward a therapeutic concept of this kind have been with us for a number of years now, frequently in the form of counseling for self-therapy, counseling of a kind that I once advocated myself. I no longer recommend this course. I feel strongly that we need the company of an enlightened witness to embark on the journey. Unfortunately, it is rare for therapists to have enjoyed such company in their own training. I am only too well aware of the various forms of anxiety assailing therapists, their fear of hurting their parents if they dare to face their own childhood distress head on and without embellishment, and the resultant reluctance to support their patients fully in their search. But the more we write and talk on the subject, the sooner this state of affairs will change and the anxieties lose some of their power over us. In a society with a receptive attitude toward the distress of children, none of us will be alone with our histories. Therapists will be more inclined to forsake Freud’s principle of neutrality and to take the side of the children their clients once were. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

5 " But that can only be possible when mothers and fathers no longer unconsciously assume that their children have been brought into the world to alleviate the frustrations and repair the damage they have suffered in their own lives. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

6 " If we suppress them, feelings can indeed hide themselves from the conscious mind, but they frequently resurface in the form of bodily symptoms, which conceal their real content and intensity, making it much more difficult to deal with them than it would be if they were admitted to consciousness. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

7 " There was no way that he could repair the damage done to their past; it was a task completely beyond his means. The path he chose–shutting himself off–was perhaps the only way of putting together a life for himself and avoiding damage from his mother’s projections. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

8 " In therapy Katya realized how much her relationship with her son had been burdened by the shadows of her childhood, and memories of her mother came back to her more and more clearly, memories of the way she had refused to relate to her eldest daughter. Katya was now able to feel her infant needs and express them in a diary, from which her friend sent me an excerpt after Katya’s death: "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

9 " As adults they will retain the perspective of the helpless child with no alternative but to come to terms with its fate. They will not know that, paradoxically, they can only grow out of this childlike attitude if they lose the fear of the wrath of God (their parents) and are willing to inform themselves about the destructive consequences of repressed childhood traumas. But if they do become alive to this truth, they will regain their lost sensibility for the suffering of children and free themselves of their emotional blindness. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

10 " None of us were carried by our mothers as the child of God; indeed, for far too many parents, children are merely a burden. What we can do, provided we really want to, is learn from the attitude displayed by Joseph and Mary. They did not demand docility from their son, and they felt no urge to inflict violence on him. Only if we fear the confrontation with our own histories will we need to have power over others and cling to it with all our might. And if we do that it is because we feel too weak to be true to ourselves and our own feelings. But being honest to our children will make us strong. In order to tell the truth we do not need to have power over others. Power is something we only need in order to spread lies and hypocrisy, to mouth empty words and pretend they are true. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

11 " Even then Katya remained blind to the fact that as an adult she had ways of escaping her dilemma, that she could have separated from her husband. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

12 " Every criminal was humiliated, neglected, or abused in childhood, but few of them can admit to it. Many genuinely do not know that they were. Thus denial gets in the way of statistical surveys based on the question-and-answer method, none of which will have any practical prophylactic effect as long as our eyes and ears remain closed to the issues posed by childhood. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

13 " The body knows everything that has happened to it, but it has no language to express that knowledge. It is like the children we once were, the children who see all but, without the aid of the adults, remain helpless and alone. Accordingly, whenever the emotions from the past rise to the surface they are invariably accompanied by the fears of the helpless child dependent on the understanding, or at least the reassurances, of the parents. Even parents at a loss to understand their children because they are unaware of their own histories can provide such reassurance. They can assuage the children’s fears (and their own) by giving them protection, safety, and continuity. And our cognitive system, in dialogue with the body, can do the same. "

― Alice Miller , The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self