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.

Repressed pain may reveal itself more privately, as in a woman, sexually exploited as a child, who has denied her childhood reality and in order not to feel the pain is perpetually fleeing her past with the help of men, alcohol, drugs, or achievement. She needs a constant thrill to keep boredom at bay;

THE POOR RICH CHILD

Quite often I have been faced with people who were praised and admired for their talents and their achievements,

According to prevailing attitudes, these people—the pride of their parents—should have had a strong and stable sense of self-assurance.

they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be—but behind all this lurks depression, a feeling of emptiness and self-alienation,

These dark feelings will come to the fore as soon as the drug of grandiosity fails,

whenever they suddenly get the feeling they have failed to live up to some ideal imag...

emotional world of their own childhood, however, is impaired—characterized by a lack of respect, a compulsion to control and manipulate, and a demand for achievement.

no conception of their true needs—beyond the desire for achievement.

The child has a primary need from the very beginning of her life to be regarded and respected

In an atmosphere of respect and tolerance for her feelings, the child, in the phase of separation, will be able to give up symbiosis with the mother and accomplish the steps toward individuation and autonomy.

Parents who did not experience this climate as children are themselves deprived; throughout their lives they will continue to look for what their own parents could not give them

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

This mother

was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from everyone else behind a hard, authoritarian, even totalitarian facade.

This child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively,

disturbance: As long as the therapist is not aware of his repression, it can compel him to use his patients, who depend on him, to meet his unmet needs with substitutes.

I think that the cause of an emotional disturbance is to be found in the infant’s early adaptation.

such consequence is the person’s inability to experience consciously certain feelings of his own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, or anxiety), either in childhood or later in adulthood.

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,

But they will nevertheless stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.

denial,

alcohol,

drugs).

Intellectual...

very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. It can have disastrous results, however, when the mind...

(see my reflections on Nietzsche’s illness in The Untouched Key [1990] and Breaking Down t...

Accommodation

“as-if personality.”

reveals only what is...

He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it.

mutual dependency,

prevents individuation.

bond perm...

parents have found in their child’s false self the confirmation they were looking for, a substitute f...

But the experience of one’s own truth, and the postambivalent knowledge of it, make it possible to return to one’s own world of feelings at an adult level—without paradise, but with the ability to mourn. And this ability does, indeed, give us back our vitality.

In therapy, the small and lonely child that is hidden behind her achievements wakes up and asks: “What would have happened if I had appeared before you sad, needy, angry, furious? Where would your love have been then?

the result is always a new authority that is establishing itself in the patient—a new empathy with her own fate, born out of mourning.

Gradually, she realizes how she is forced to look for distraction when she is moved, upset, or sad.

The suffering person begins to be articulate and breaks with her former compliant attitudes, but because of her early experience she cannot believe she is not incurring mortal danger; she fears rejection and punishment when she defends her rights in the present. The

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.

Depression and a

sense of inner emptiness are the price they must pay for this control. The true self cannot communicate because it has remained unconscious, and therefore undeveloped, in its inner prison.

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.

A child can never see through unconscious manipulation. It is like the air he breathes; he knows no other, and it appears to him to be the only breathable air.

The more insight I gain into the unconscious manipulation of children by their parents, the more urgent it seems to me that we resolve our repression.

Children who are intelligent, alert, attentive, sensitive, and completely attuned to the mothers well-being are entirely at her disposal. Transparent, clear, and reliable, they are easy to manipulate as long as their true self (their emotional world) remains in the cellar of the glass house in which they have to live—sometimes

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

His conscious wish was to give the child something valuable of which he himself had been deprived,