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

by Alice Miller

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.

Older children, particularly as they reach puberty, may attach themselves to new values, which are often opposed to those of the parents.

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.

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

We find a similar example in the behavior of addicts. People who as children successfully repressed their intense feelings often try to regain—at least for a short time—their lost intensity of experience with the help of drugs or alcohol.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents’ expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight

Probably the greatest of wounds—not to have been loved just as one truly was—cannot heal without the work of mourning.

behavior have stayed with him as repressed memory, stored up in his body. (The same happens with mistreatments and molestations that have been endured.)

As the child grows up, he cannot cease living his own truth and expressing it somewhere, perhaps in complete secrecy. In this way a person can have adapted completely to the demands of his surroundings and can have developed a false self, but in his perversion of his obsessions he still allows a portion of his true self to survive—in torment. And so the true self lives on, but underground,

The most brilliant intellect cannot break this block down.

If a person can see through to the goals and compulsions behind this sort of provocation, then the whole decayed building collapses and gives way to true, deep, and defenseless mourning. When this happens, all the distortions are no longer necessary.

Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

It is very striking to see how often a sexual “addiction” ceases when the patient begins to experience his own feelings and can recognize his true needs.

Demian, Hermann Hesse

“A Child’s Heart”

Often a child’s very gifts

(his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness—and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations.

Mere words, however skilled the interpretation, will leave unchanged or even deepen the split between intellectual speculation and the knowledge of the body, the split from which he already suffers.

Many people suffering from severe symptoms are very intelligent.

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.

The contempt for others in grandiose, successful people always includes disrespect for their own true selves, as their scorn implies: “Without these superior qualities of mine, a person is completely worthless.” This means further: “Without these achievements, these gifts, I could never be loved, would never have been loved.”

for contempt, too, has in its own way served to deny the reality of the past. It is, after all, less painful to think that the others do not understand because they are too stupid.

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. These people might be the children of grandiose parents, whom they as children had no hope of emulating; but later, as adults, they unconsciously pass on this atmosphere to those around them.

A person who has matured through her own experience cannot be tricked with fascinating, incomprehensible words.

Finally, a person who has consciously worked through the whole tragedy of her own fate will recognize another’s suffering more clearly, though the other may be trying to hide it.

The Body Never Lies and Your Saved Life