The True “Drama of the Gifted Child”: The Phantom Alice Miller — The Real Person

by Martin Miller

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 the hope of rectifying as adults the damage suffered in childhood, nor in compensating for their childhood deficits with other people. Clients can rather learn to become a reliable partner for themselves, providing a supportive inner dialogue, thus ensuring that they can maintain their wellbeing autonomously.