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April 28 - May 3, 2023
I also want to give courage to people to face their history. Such a confrontation with one’s past is also active peace work because I no longer need to unconsciously pass my repressed biographical experience onto others.
When I process how I was victimized as a child, and other traumatic experiences, I no longer need to victimize others by identifying with the perpetrator.
It seems that you are not able, or not yet able, to perceive what really had happened to you. That is why you are in danger to let others suffer for your blindness, and to consider this quite right and normal.
For the emptiness is noticed all too clearly, when the child within is strangled for good.
But much sadder was for me the observation that you sometimes snapped at me out of the blue, without my giving you even the slightest provocation. I did not have the feeling that you treated me like your father had treated me, but that you abused me in the same way he had handled you. Then I felt, for a moment, like a completely trampled down child, which I myself had never been with him; but I was able to observe how he handled you.
It is a tragic fate to have a father who beats a helpless child. That is not your fault. But not wanting to see, as an adult, how he is, and to sacrifice one’s developmental opportunities and maturation chances for this blindness, to turn oneself slowly into this father, in order to protect him and to spare him—this is not fate. This need not to be so. It is rather a destructive and self-destructive decision, for which you as an adult bear the entire responsibility.
This is why I decided to send you this letter now. If at all possible, I want to save your children from also having to suffer because of the curse of your and my childhood. This can only be avoided when you one day wake up from your sleep + begin to see the realities within + around you. This is a heartfelt wish for you from your mother
children have an extraordinary talent to grasp parental needs in an ingeniously nonverbal way. They understand perfectly what is expected of them, and behave accordingly.
I had to transmute, I had to construct a new person out of myself, a false identity, in order to survive. I had to learn to show myself correctly in public as this new person. I sensed that even though I was alive, yet in some way I still had to kill myself in order to survive.
Often when I read my mother’s responses to these letters, I felt discomfort. In all her answers, Alice Miller took a very clear position: she asked the letter-writers to defend themselves against the parents and to confront them concretely with their actions. I felt betrayed when I read these responses because when I confronted my mother, she not only totally rejected my criticism but, as I shall describe later, severed her relationship with me.
Human beings develop a false self in order to protect their inherent potential. In order to protect their originality, human beings, if need be, accept a life-long estrangement from themselves.
self-worth (Kohut); the right of the child to develop his original self in the protection of a loving parental relationship (Winnicott); and the enormous importance of the emotional attachment to the primary caregiver (Bowlby).
Accordingly, she understands mental disorders as a consequence of emotional self-alienation: grandiose and narcissistic behavior, and depression, are the consequences. In grandiosity, the lurking depression is warded off. Depression is the expression of the true self being blocked from developing in a sympathetic, nurturing social environment.
Those undergoing therapy had a right to find out about how their parents had behaved towards them. The objective of therapy was to find out this truth for oneself, and to claim the right to develop one’s own true self.
In her theoretical world, the helpless child is given a prominent place and receives unique attention. Needless to say, her theory derived from her own negative experiences with her parents, who did not provide the support she needed. She felt unseen, misunderstood, and abandoned. That she then repeated with me, her own child, this parental behavior, which had so hurt and burdened her, may also have played a role in the development of her theories.
Those who want to follow it, even though they were disrespected, mistreated, misused by their parents, can only do this if they deny their true emotions. The body often rebels against this denial and this ignoring of unresolved childhood traumas with severe illnesses.
It is now known from neurobiology that every experience we have in relation to reality, to the outside world, is emotionally represented and stored in the body.
Only today do we know how humans experience emotions; specifically, that emotions are primarily biological phenomena which unconsciously ensure for us communication between the nerve cells and the brain. Emotions are quite simply the language of the brain. Without emotional information from the organism, the brain is helpless and cannot react. Without emotions, we are not at all able to survive.
But because of isolation, children have no choice but to adapt themselves to the parents. They develop a false self, and the eventual consequences are psychic and somatic illnesses.
My parents never entertained the idea to consider and self-criticize their behavior towards me. They made me an outsider within the family. As a child, I could not make sense of this behavior and simply did not understand why I was so excluded from my own family.
The situation is even more difficult as the son of Alice Miller, world-famous researcher on childhood, who has fought like no other for the rights of children to their own psychic development and against physically abusive parents.
I felt completely overwhelmed dealing with you, a helpless child, and you did not exactly make it easy for me to take my first steps as a mother. From the beginning, you refused to feed at the breast. I was very offended. I was so disappointed that my own child rejected me and my motherly love. I had to let milk be pumped and you drank in very small doses.
Our maids or nannies remained my major attachment figures during the following years. Together with them, I formed a family within the family; I spoke German with them, while my parents spoke Polish with one another. However, the domestic help changed often; my mother probably found it hard to tolerate that her son was closer to his nannies than to her.
We had to be quiet all the time, because she was always tired or on the move. It was impossible to reach out to her; she alone decided when she had time and interest. I did not have the impression that my experiences were of interest to my parents. Emotionally, I was left to myself.
As I see it today, my mother could not bear that I struck out on my own. I was escaping her control.
I will get in touch by phone when I feel emotionally capable. Because I cannot confront things and be nice at the same time. I suppress something. But it is so difficult for a child to observe, against his own nature, realities which are unthinkable for him, which should not be.
And I cannot deny that I myself personally drove you into this misery. That I meant well does not change anything about the facts that it was poison.
I was able to empathize with many people, but only with my son I could not. When he told me, I denied it.
I had to see that I had treated my first child almost like my mother had treated me. Despite my training I did not succeed in escaping this fate. Now at least I no longer want to deny it.
I became the victim of a projection against which I had no defense.
the body never forgets, the body stores memories that must be resolved in order for the pain to vanish.
“Unresolved traumas can be transferred onto the next generation to a grave extent. This we know at the latest since the examinations of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. This transference onto the children happens by introjection of the traumatized parent.”
Every human being should have the right to develop his or her own potential. Every child is born with originality, and parents are tasked with nurturing and supporting their children in developing this originality.
Stored in the brain are one’s experiences with other people, with oneself, and the impact one has had on others: our memories shape our biographies. Whenever I help my patients reconstruct their biographies, I benefit greatly from one of my mother’s prime concepts; namely that it is imperative to accept the child’s perspective as genuine experience. This radically changes the therapeutic process and stands in stark contrast to other forms of therapy.
In my experience as a therapist, the raging inner child is only helped by the new perspective of offering oneself as an alternative to the parents, by becoming the mature caring adult for one’s own inner child. Thanks to the acquired biographical knowledge, which shows what went wrong in childhood, clients learn for themselves to do things differently and better in the future. They can only make up for their parents’ shortcomings by learning to treat themselves more caringly than they were treated by their parents. Neither is there anything to be gained in challenging one’s elderly parents in
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My mother would have certainly revised her radical stance if she had tried to validate her ideas in practice. She herself became a victim of her radical feelings of hatred for her parents. She never succeeded in escaping these feelings of hate.
mentalizing means to notice mental states in oneself and in others. These mental states show implicitly or explicitly perceived reality. By mentalizing, I am able to recognize how I sense and experience the outer world in my inner mental world. Thus I can facilitate access to myself. The same is true in relation to others. Anyone who mentalizes can empathize with the emotional, mental world of somebody else.
The purpose of therapy is to disengage from this emotional bond with one’s parents, and for oneself to become the contact person for the inner child. In therapy, clients mentally build a parent-child relationship with themselves.
Clients can improve their relationship with themselves significantly when they learn, in role-playing for instance, to contradict parents as they had experienced them in the past. They can hold their parents accountable, ask questions that had always remained unanswered. As children, they did not have the slightest chance to understand what was happening to them.
“I would like a therapist who admires me, who sees how I suffer, who allows me my freedom, who does not come too close, who never lets me down, who does not cause me pain.”
humans have basic needs that absolutely must be fulfilled: attachment, self-worth, control, and the avoidance of displeasure and the pursuit of pleasure. All four are socially defined and their satisfaction creates well-being in humans that constitutes mental health.
But when people have experienced in childhood that their basic needs were not fulfilled, causing negative feelings, they later defend against those needs by means of the avoidance mode. They want at all cost to avoid further disappointment. Yet basic needs cannot be repressed, and thus a state of stress results that can only be compensated for neurotically.
Adults stand up for themselves and learn, despite difficulties, to remain in the approach mode. They no longer immediately take refuge in the avoidance mode, as they did as children. They know exactly when approach or avoidance are called for. As adults, they can decide freely if they want to say yes or no.
To keep injustice quiet protects the profiteers.
Alice Miller conveyed to her readers new hope to overcome the deadly cycle of war, attachment disturbance and domestic violence. In public she was the protagonist in the fight for self-realization and the protection of children; at home she was rather the protagonist of personal tragedy, repeating the cycle of attachment disorder and violence with her eyes open.
“Probably everyone has a more or less concealed inner chamber that he hides even from himself and in which the props of his childhood drama are to be found. These props may be his secret delusion, a secret perversion, or quite simply the unmastered aspects of his childhood suffering. The only ones who will certainly gain access to this hidden chamber are his children.”
