Banished Knowledge Quotes

“Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“To forget and to repress would be a good solution if there were no more to it than that. But repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms. And the worst thing is that although the feelings of the abused child have been silenced at the point of origin, that is, in the presence of those who caused the pain, they find their voice when the battered child has children of his own.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“Not to take one's own suffering seriously, to make light of it or even to laugh at it, is considered good manners in our culture.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“A human being born into a cold, indifferent world will regard his situation as the only possible one.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“Cruelty is the opposite of love, and its traumatic effect, far from being reduced, is actually reinforced if it is presented as a sign of love.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“In discussions about the sexual abuse of children, the question constantly comes up: Why does the girl’s mother ignore the signals, or why, through her attitude, does she make it impossible for her daughter to confide in her? The mother’s behavior is particularly hard to understand when it turns out that she herself was abused as a child. Yet the key to understanding lies in this information. It is those very mothers who suffered similar abuse in their childhood, and have kept it repressed ever since, who are blind and deaf to the situation of their daughters. They cannot bear to be reminded of their own history, and so they fail the child.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“But a child who was merely pushed aside and disciplined, who never experienced soothing caresses, is not aware that anything like nonexploitative caresses can exist. She has no choice but to accept any closeness she is offered rather than be destroyed. Under certain circumstances she will even accept sexual abuse for the sake of finding at least some affection rather than freezing up entirely. When, as an adult woman, she comes to realize that she was cheated out of love, she may be ashamed of her former need and hence feel guilty. She will blame herself because she dare not blame her mother, who failed to satisfy the child’s need or perhaps even condemned it. Psychoanalysts protect the father and embroider the sexual abuse of the child with the Oedipus, or Electra, complex, while some feminist therapists idealize the mother, thus hindering access to the child’s first traumatic experiences with the mother. Both approaches can lead to a dead end, since the dissolving of pain and fear is not possible until the full truth of the facts can be seen and accepted.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“The life-saving function of repression in childhood is transformed in adulthood into a life-destroying force.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“What happens when a child reared in love, protection, and honesty is suddenly beaten by someone? The child will scream, give vent to his anger, then burst into tears, reveal his pain, and probably ask: Why are you doing this to me? None of this is possible when a child trained from the very outset to be obedient is beaten by his own parents, whom he loves. The child must stifle his pain and anger and repress the whole situation to survive. For to be able to show anger the child needs the confidence based on experience that he will not be killed as a result. A battered child cannot build up this confidence; children are indeed sometimes killed when they dare to rebel against injustice. Hence the child must suppress his rage to survive in a hostile environment, must even stifle his massive, overwhelming pain in order not to die of it. So now the silence of forgetting descends over everything, and the parents are idealized—they have never done any wrong. “And if they did beat me, I deserved it.” This is the familiar version of the torture that has been endured.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“The Jungian doctrine of the shadow and the notion that evil is the reverse of good are aimed at denying the reality of evil. But evil is real. It is not innate but acquired, and it is never the reverse of good but rather its destroyer. Shakespeare was aware of this. He saw and showed the origins of evil but never tried to relativize evil by using psychological explanations, as is done in psychoanalysis, for instance. Richard III, Macbeth, and some of his other characters are evil because they are destructive, even when we know why they have become so. Our knowledge cannot alter them. They can change only if they sense, not merely intellectually but with their feelings, how they have been turned into evil people.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“Anyone who is not allowed to condemn outright what is evil, perfidious, vile, perverse, and mendacious will always be lacking in orientation and compelled blindly to repeat his own experiences. Unfortunately this fact is not well known because it calls into question the traditional values of morality and religion. Almost all official agencies for the aid of abused children work on the confusing principle of “Help, not condemn,” and constantly emphasize their nonjudgmental attitude. But this is the very attitude that makes it harder for the persons seeking help to liberate themselves from the compulsion to repeat their own history, a liberation that is possible only if the occurrence of abuse is deplored and the perpetrators condemned outright.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“If a mother can make it clear to a child that at that particular moment when she slapped him her love for him deserted her and she was dominated by other feelings that had nothing to do with the child, the child can keep a clear head, feel respected, and not be disoriented in his relationship to his mother.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive. No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“The feminist movement will forfeit none of its strength if it finally admits that mothers also abuse their children. Only the truth, even the most uncomfortable, endows a movement with the strength to change society, not the denial of the truth.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“For it is easier to see oneself as a criminal than to know and feel that one was, and is, an innocent victim who must be prepared at all times for torture and persecution. Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“The public forum is not, of course, the most helpful place to conduct a profitable confrontation with one's parents. If we are to allow the feelings of childhood to be revived, we need an enlightened witness and not the pent-up, undigested hatred of formerly abused children who, as adults, totally identify with the perpetrators. To expose oneself defenselessly to public view while harboring such feelings from childhood can amount to a kind of self-inflicted punishment, something one seeks when, in spite of everything, one still feels guilty at having expressed the criticism and is prepared to accept hate reactions as a well deserved punishment.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“Denn hätte mein Vater den Mut gehabt, zu sehen, was mir geschah, und mich zu verteidigen [...] Ich hätte es dann gewagt, meinen Wahrnehmungen zu trauen, mich besser zu schützen und mich nicht, ähnlich wie von meiner Mutter, von ignoranten Menschen schädigen zu lassen.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“For nobody achieves freedom by blaming people who in reality never harmed him. By directing diffuse, nonspecific, and unsubstantiated accusations at surrogate persons, the patient will achieve no improvement of his condition but will often remain in a state of disastrous confusion. Liberation comes with the ability to defend oneself where it is necessary and appropriate. The more realistic a person becomes and the more he frees himself of ideological and theoretical trimmings, the better he will succeed.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“However, brutal programs are avidly absorbed by children who have never been allowed to defend themselves against overt or subtle tormenting at home or who, for other reasons, can never articulate their feelings—for example, to spare a threatened parent. So they can satisfy their secret longings for revenge by identifying with what they see on TV. These children already carry within them the seeds of future destructiveness. Whether or not this destructiveness will erupt depends largely on whether life offers them more than violence: in other words, whether witnesses willing to rescue them cross their path. What is important to understand is that the child learns cruelty not by watching TV but always by suffering and repressing.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“But this awakening of sensitivity for the martyrdom of childhood has far-reaching consequences: Suddenly it is no longer possible to regard cruelty, perversion, and crime as a form of upbringing for our own good; we are forced to come to a decision and stop finding excuses for crime.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“If I as a helpless child was abused and am not allowed to see this, I will abuse other helpless creatures without realizing what I am doing. I will also refuse to read books on abuse, or I won’t want to understand them because, if I did, I would have to feel the tragedy of my childhood and the pain of having been misled at such an early age.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“A great deal of understanding is shown for an unemployed father who beats his children. There is no problem understanding an overburdened executive who does the same thing, especially when he is irritated by his wife. The wife also meets with understanding when she can’t help beating her child after the milk boils over. This parental behavior is understood because the therapists have probably been victims of such situations countless times and are invariably ready to understand the parents rather than face the repressed truth about their own lives. They have been trained for this, and at the same time they have been taught that it is dangerous to become aware of the situation of the child.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“In my generation the child learned to identify completely with the parents’ perspective and never to question it. In the works of all the authors I know, I have observed that, despite occasional rebellion, they end up defending their parents against their own accusations. Accusations against parents are often associated with mortal fears, not only because of real threats but because a small child feels he is in deadly danger if he loses the love of the person closest to him. Thus the old repressed fear is preserved in the adult, and the danger signals stored so long ago can remain effective for a lifetime.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“The patient must uncover the facts with the aid of his feelings; he must examine his discoveries, query his own statements, until he arrives at the certainty: Such and such actually happened. But the realm of the possible is infinite, and that is what the therapist must know. There is nothing that could not be inflicted on a child. This knowledge enables the therapist to accompany the patient on his journey, a journey that often leads through hells and torture chambers. These must be returned to, again and again, until every detail of the traumatic scene can be experienced, to allow the effect of the trauma to dissolve and the injury at last to heal.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

“I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.”
― Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries