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

by Alice Miller

The Accumulation of Strong, Hidden Feelings Depressive phases may last several weeks before strong emotions from childhood break through.

Confronting the Parents There will be times of depressive moods even after a person has started to resist the demands of his parents, as many things remain unconscious, repressed.

whenever we suppress an impulse or an unwanted emotion. Then, suddenly, a depressive mood will stifle all spontaneity.

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.

A child does not yet have this possibility open to her. She cannot yet see through her mechanism of self-deception, and, on the other hand, she is far more threatened than an adult by the intensity of her feelings if she does not have a supportive, empathic environment.

The extreme intensity of childhood feeling is to be found nowhere else, except in puberty. The recollection of the pains of puberty, however—of not being able to understand or to place our own impulses—is usually more accessible than the earliest traumas, which are often hidden behind the picture of an idyllic childhood or even behind an almost complete amnesia.

It is precisely because a child’s feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, and unfortunately these walls also impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.

person seeking help is all too ready to give up his own pleasure in discovery and self-expression and accommodate himself to his therapist’s concepts, out of fear of losing the latter’s affection, understanding, and empathy, for which he has been waiting all his life. Because of his early experiences with his mother, he cannot believe that this need not happen. If he gives way to this fear and adapts himself, the therapy slides over into the realm of the false self, and the true self remains hidden and undeveloped.

It is part of the dialectic of the grieving process that the experience of pain both encourages and is dependent on self-discovery.

Because grandiosity is the counterpart of depression within the narcissistic disturbance, the achievement of freedom from both forms of disturbance is hardly possible without deeply felt mourning about the situation of the former child. This ability to grieve—that is, to give up the illusion of his “happy” childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt he has endured—can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on his Sisyphean task.

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. 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. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening. We no longer need to keep it hidden behind the prison walls of illusion. We know now who and what caused our pain, and it is exactly this knowledge that gives us freedom at last from the old pain.

If therapists want to avoid doing so, they must take all of the patients’ feelings seriously.

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

Today it is hardly possible for any group to remain completely isolated from others with different values. The individual must therefore find his support within himself if he is to avoid becoming the victim of various interests and ideologies. The so-called therapeutic groups try to but cannot provide or replace this maturational process. Their goal is to “empower” their members by providing them with support and a sense of belonging. Since the suppression of childhood feelings is the rule within these groups, however, the individual’s depression cannot be resolved. Moreover, a person can become addicted to the group itself, as the group provides the illusion that the unmet needs of the former child can eventually be fulfilled (by the group) in the adult. With such illusions, no one can truly heal.

The strength within ourselves—through access to our own real needs and feelings and the possibility of expressing them—is crucially important for us if we want to live without depression and addiction.

Some children have latent powers to resist adaptation and become partially adapted. Older children, particularly as they reach puberty, may attach themselves to new values, which are often opposed to those of the parents. An adolescent may accept and conform to the ideals of a group of youths just as he did to those of his parents when he was younger. But since this attempt is not rooted in an awareness of his own true needs and feelings, he is again giving up and denying his true self in order to be accepted and loved, this time by a peer group. His renewed sacrifice will therefore not relieve his depression. He is not really himself, nor does he know or love himself: Everything he undertakes is done in hope of maki...

This sadomasochistic marriage, like the other example, represents an attempt to break away from the parents’ social system with the help of another one. Amar was certainly able to free himself from the mother of his adolescence, but he remained emotionally tied to the mother of his early childhood (and his unconscious memories of her), whose role was taken over by his wife as long as he was not able to experience the feelings from that period.

The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive.

Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing “love.” Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.

This stage of rapturous enchantment can be compared to grandiosity, just as the next (the consuming longing for himself) can be likened to depression. Narcissus wanted to be nothing but the beautiful youth; he totally denied his true self. In trying to be at one with the beautiful picture, he gave himself up—to death or, in Ovid’s version, to being changed into a flower. This death is the logical consequence of the fixation on the false self. It is not only the “beautiful,” “good,” and pleasant feelings that make us really alive, deepen our existence, and give us crucial insight, but often precisely the unacceptable and unadapted ones from which we would prefer to escape: helplessness, shame, envy, jealousy, confusion, rage, and grief. These feelings can be experienced in therapy. When they are understood, they open the door to our inner world that is much richer than the “beautiful countenance”! 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.

Many adults first become aware of their feelings of helplessness, jealousy, and loneliness through their own children, since they had no chance to acknowledge and experience these feelings consciously in childhood.

children have no way of telling anyone, except perhaps later in the form of obsessions or other symptoms, the language of which is sufficiently veiled that the mother is not betrayed.