Only the never-ending work of mourning can help us from lapsing into the illusion that we have found the parent we once urgently needed – empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear, without unintelligible contradictions. Such a parent was never ours, for a mother can react empathically only to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood; when she denies the vicissitudes of her early life, she wears invisible chains.

— Alice Miller

Alice Miller Quotes

A person is not likely to conceive something monstrous if he does not know it somehow or other from experience. We simply tend to refuse to take a child’s suffering seriously enough.

— Alice Miller

She needs a constant thrill to keep boredom at bay; not even one moment of quiet can be permitted during which the burning loneliness of her childhood experience might be felt, for she fears that feeling more than death. She will continue in her flight unless she learns that the awareness of old feelings is not deadly but liberating.

— Alice Miller

Is it possible, then, to free ourselves altogether from illusions? History demonstrates that they sneak in everywhere, that every life is full of them – perhaps because the truth often seems unbearable to us. And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness. In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If.

— Alice Miller

The legacy of the parents is yet another generation condemned to hide from the true self while operating unconsciously under the influence of repressed memories. Unless the heir casts off his “inheritance” by becoming fully conscious of his true past, and thus of his true nature, loneliness in the parental home will necessarily be followed by an adulthood lived in emotional isolation.

— Alice Miller

The greatest cruelty that can be inflicted on children is to refuse to let them express their anger and suffering except at the risk of losing their parents’ love and affection.

— Alice Miller

What is addiction really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood. The drug business would not nourish if there were not so many people who, in refusing to acknowledge their wounds, are in a permanent state of self-betrayal. Thus, people work to get rid of symptoms instead of searching out the cause.

— Alice Miller

The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.

— Alice Miller

In every adult who has suffered abuse as a child lies dormant that small child’s fear of punishment at the hands of the parents if he or she should dare to rebel against their behavior. But it will lie dormant only as long as that fear remains unconscious. Once consciously experienced, it will dissolve in the course of time.

— Alice Miller

No longer to be compelled to betray one’s own feelings and senses, no longer to allow oneself to be deflected from the truth of facts by ideologies of any kind, is already to lend a hand in the demolition of the inhuman, destructive wall of silence – the wall that we were forced to respect as children and which has again and again resulted in fascist behavior.

— Alice Miller

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

If not consciously acknowledged and mourned, uncertainty about one’s descent can cause great anxiety and unrest, all the more so if, as in Alois’s case, it is linked with an ominous rumor that can neither be proven nor completely refuted.

— Alice Miller

Everyone who has been beaten as a child is susceptible to fear; everyone who was deprived of love as a child will long for it, sometimes their whole lives. This longing contains a whole bundle of expectations, and those expectations, coupled with the fear we have referred to, form an excellent medium in which the Fourth Commandment can thrive. It represents the power of adults over children, and it’s reflected unmistakably in all the religions of the world.

— Alice Miller

The answer is that we can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else. We can only be the people we are, and we cannot force our parents to love us. There are parents who can only love the mask their child wears.

— Alice Miller

It is above all the children already born that have a right to life – a right to coexistence with adults in a world in which, with or without the help of the church, violence against children has been unequivocally outlawed. Until such legislation exists, talk of “the right to life” remains not only a mockery of humanity but a contribution to its destruction.

— Alice Miller

It is our access to the truth that can enable us to prevent such people, who yearn for the “order’ spawned by violence, from realizing their destructive plans. Fascism will have had its day once society ceases to deny the knowledge we already possess about the production of brutality, violence, and dehumanization in childhood and minimize its dangers. Once this has happened, it won’t have a chance in this society.

— Alice Miller

The banished emotions reassert themselves and invade the body.

— Alice Miller

What is valid for the individual is also valid for the development of a wider social consciousness. Here, too, the monstrous truth regarding the causes and consequences of child abuse and the way that violence can be bred into human beings cannot be admitted to the consciousness all at once, but must proceed slowly, step by step.

— Alice Miller

I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.

— Alice Miller

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

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
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