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

by Alice Miller

Very often they show disdain and irony, even derision and cynicism, for the child they were.

The child has a primary need from the very beginning of her life to be regarded and respected as the person she really is at any given time.

they are to furnish these prerequisites for the healthy development of their child, the parents themselves ought to have grown up in such an atmosphere. If they did, they will be able to assure the child the protection and well-being she needs to develop trust.

Parents who did not experience this climate as children are themselves deprived;

This search, of course, can never fully succeed,

substitute means,

The most efficacious objects for substitute gratification are a parent’s own children.

for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully,

the emptiness is real.

loneliness in the parental home will necessarily be followed by an adulthood lived in emotional isolation.

At first it will be mortifying to see that she is not always good, understanding, tolerant, controlled, and, above all, without needs, for these have been the basis of her self-respect.

They will admit only those feelings that are accepted and approved by their inner censor, who is their parents’ heir.

used them to gratify their own needs;

we were compelled to gratify their unconscious needs at the cost of our own emotional development.

If the repression stays unresolved, the parents’ childhood tragedy is unconsciously continued on in their children.

EVERY child has a legitimate need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother.

provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child.

rather the mother’s own projections.

mother who allows herself to be made use of as a function of the child’s development—

even a mother who is not especially warmhearted can make this development possible,

healthy self-feeling to mean the unquestioned certainty that the feelings and needs one experiences are a part of one’s self.

she was able to find in her child: someone at her disposal who could be used as an echo and could be controlled, who was completely centered on her, would never desert her, and offered her full attention and admiration.

In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood, manifested as the total alienation from the self in the adult.

grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self that results from denial.

one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of

ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.

He seeks insatiably for admiration, of which he never gets enough because admiration is not the same thing as love.

It is only a substitute gratification of the primary needs for respect,

The grandiose person is never really free; first, because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.

She again stood helpless and confused, as the small girl once did before her mother’s face, in which she found not herself but only her mother’s confusion.

his sense of emptiness and futility, even of shame and anger, can return the next morning if his happiness the previous night was not only due to his creative activity in playing and expressing the part but was also, and above all, rooted in the substitute satisfaction of old needs for echoing, mirroring, and being seen and understood.

but these things cannot offer him more than their present value;

they cannot fill the old gap.

Again, as long as he is able to deny this need with the...

the old wound can...

Actually, however, that personality has no secure foundation and is dependent on the supporting pillars of success, achievement, “strength,” and, above all, the denial of the emotional world of his childhood.

A fragility of self-esteem because of a lack of confidence in one’s own feelings and wishes

An enormous fear of loss of love and therefore a great readiness to conform

Depression consists of a denial of one’s own emotional reactions.

a child may learn very early in life what she is not supposed to feel.

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.

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.

Disrespect is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings, which could trigger memories of events in one’s repressed history.

fountainhead of all contempt, all discrimination, is the more or less conscious, uncontrolled, and covert exercise of power over the child by the adult.

Above all, there is the mechanism of turning repressed suffering into active behavior.

astonishingly similar the ways are in which people protect themselves against their childhood experiences, despite great differences in personality structure and education.

precipitate speed that I couldn’t fully understand it. She went through moments of sudden hate and rage, reproaching me for indifference and lack of understanding. Linda could hardly recognize me anymore, although

but it was only intellectual knowledge.

The fascination of such tormenting relationships is a result of repressed memories and the struggle for a better outlet at last.