Free from Lies Quotes

“My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents’ behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all.”
― Alice Miller, Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs

“The cruelty of individuals is not something imposed on them by some mysterious agency but by their parents and other people involved in their upbringing. It takes shape in the brain of a child exposed to cruelty.”
― Alice Miller, Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs

“People brought up cruelly (and unfortunately that is still the majority) willingly submit to dictators and cheer them on when they supply them with an enemy they can execrate.”
― Alice Miller, Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs

“People who delegate their own responsibility to higher powers are willfully ignoring what the facts tell them. They don’t care about the truth. They want to be left in peace. Goodness they attribute to God, evil to the devil or their children’s innate wickedness.”
― Alice Miller, Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs

“And this succeeded so completely because children want to love their parents and prefer not to look the truth in the face. The truth is too awful for these children to bear, so they avert their eyes. But the body remembers everything, and as adults those children unconsciously and automatically rehearse their parents’ sadism on their own children, on their subjects or employees, on everyone dependent on them.”
― Alice Miller, Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs

“To free them from this isolation—the feeling of being the sole guardian of a guilty secret—parents would need to summon up the courage to admit their errors to their children. This would change the whole situation. In calm and collected conversation with their children they might say something like this:”
― Alice Miller, Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs