The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

by Alice Miller

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.

We can repair ourselves and gain our lost integrity by choosing to look more closely at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing this knowledge closer to our awareness.

from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present,

a child is at the mothers disposal. The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child’s eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did. A child can be brought up so that it becomes what she wants it to be. A child can be made to show respect; she can impose her own feelings on him, see herself mirrored in his love and admiration, and feel strong in his presence.

Thinking that one could be different, it’s an illusion.

When a woman has had to repress all these needs in relation to her own mother, they will arise from the depth of her unconscious and seek gratification through her own child, however well-educated she may be.

Accommodation 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 of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self.

This means tolerating the knowledge that, to avoid losing the “love” of our parents, we were compelled to gratify their unconscious needs at the cost of our own emotional development.

It also means being able to experience the resentment and mourning aroused by our parents’ failure to fulfill our primary needs.

Most readily available for exploitation are one’s own children or one’s patients, who at times are as obedient and as dependent on their therapists as children are on their parents.

she denies the vicissitudes of her early life, she wears invisible chains.

One is totally defenseless against this sort of manipulation in childhood. The tragedy is that the parents too have no defense against it, as long as they refuse to face their own history.

“We have done so much for you, we ought to be able to share your wealth.”

if only she refrains from preventing it and allows the child to acquire from other people what she herself lacks.

The bonding (through skin and eye contact) between mother and baby after birth stimulates in both of them the feeling that they belong together, a feeling of oneness that ideally has been growing from the time of conception.

Just now I had a conversation with a nurse. She was telling me about the pain and the difficulties of her child delivery. After a few interminable, painful hours, they went for a c-section. Her baby was the last thing she wanted to see when the procedure was done. I don’t believe this is due to a trauma in the nurse’s childhood, rather the trauma of giving birth - that also needs to be recognized and elaborated.

The child, most often an only child or the first-born, was seen as the mother’s possession.

only mourning for what he has missed, missed at the crucial time, can lead to real healing.*

However, he quite often chooses a marriage partner who either already has strong depressive traits or, at least within their marriage, unconsciously takes over and enacts the depressive components of the grandiose partner.

Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.

But to pretend to love an adult unconditionally—that is, independently of his or her deeds—would mean that we should love even a cold serial murderer or a notorious liar if only he joins our group. Can we do that? Should we even try? Why? For whose sake?

Love has many forms. One is understanding and another is acceptance. A criminal mind lives with a likely broken heart. Do not condone, but please try to understand. Only by doing so we will be able to accept the possibility of a shift in the criminal mind.

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.

We really are masters of our fate, capitans of our soul.

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.

Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood.

If the feeling that begins to arise is not experienced but reasoned away, the discovery cannot take place, and depression will triumph.

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.

Worse still, it was laughed at; they made fun of his wish.

🙁

We cannot, simply by an act of will, free ourselves from repeating the patterns of our parents’ behavior—which we had to learn very early in life.

(and clings to the illusion) that he was really loved;

the child is regarded as the parents’ property in the same way as the citizens of a totalitarian state are considered the property of its government.

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.

Unfortunately, children are too often wished for only as symbols to meet repressed needs.

I’d be curious to know more about this.

“Would you think it ridiculous if you saw a child who had to tell his troubles to a wall because there was no one else available?”

She was finally released from a compulsion to repeat that had consisted of constantly seeking a partner who had no understanding of her and then allowing herself to settle into an arrangement where she would feel helplessly dependent on him.

It is only when he is willing not to fend off his feelings of shame and fear, but rather to accept and experience them, that he can discover the real past reasons for these feelings.

The child is alone with his sin and feels that he is depraved, wicked, and outcast, though nobody scolds him, since no one as yet knows the “terrible facts.”

social pressures, but these do not have their effect on his psyche through abstract knowledge; they are firmly anchored in his earliest affective experience with his mother.

What makes us sick are those things we cannot see through, society’s constraints that we have absorbed through our parents’ eyes. No amount of reading or learning can free us from those eyes.

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.

Contempt simply evaporates, having lost its point, when it is no longer useful as a shield—against the child’s shame over his desperate, unreturned love; against his feeling of inadequacy; or above all against his rage that his parents were not available.

Thus we perpetuate the loneliness of childhood: We despise weakness, helplessness, uncertainty—in short, the child in ourselves and in others.

“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.”

to be loved and to love beyond his achievements.

Even alert parents cannot always understand their children, but they will respect their children’s feelings even when they cannot understand them.

Nationalism, racism, and fascism are in fact nothing other than ideological guises of the flight from painful, unconscious memories of endured contempt into the dangerous, destructive disrespect for human life, glorified as a political program.

Then there are the people who can seem very friendly, if a shade patronizing, but in whose presence one feels as if one were nothing. They convey the feeling that they are the only ones who exist, the only ones who have anything interesting or relevant to say. The others can only stand there and admire them in fascination, or turn away in disappointment and sorrow about their own lack of worth, unable to express themselves in these persons’ presence.

Quite a different impression will be given by those people who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but who also therefore had to solve their own problems alone. These people, who give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. In their presence one feels one can’t be recognized as a person with problems—just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom they always had to be strong.

She will not be scornful of others’ feelings, whatever their nature, because she takes her own feelings seriously and knows how to work with them. She surely will not keep the vicious circle of contempt turning.

This achievement will have not only personal consequences for the individual and her family, but also far-reaching significance for society as a whole. People who discover their past with the help of their feelings, who learn through therapy to clarify these feelings, to look for their real causes, and to resolve the transference, will no longer be compelled to displace their hatred onto innocents

Repressed emotion can be resolved as soon as it is felt, understood, and recognized as legitimate.

The mistreatment, humiliation, and exploitation of children is the same worldwide, as is the means of avoiding the memory of it. Individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common “enemy” on whom to act out their repressed rage.

Fortunately, at the same time, we now have the tools we need to truly understand ourselves, as we were and as we are.