The Courage of Alice Miller Was Astonishing

P: I just read the first article and I think the whole debate about whether she failed her son is absurd because when he was small his mother was not fully aware of how abusive education can be. She was a traditional mother like anybody else, and as a therapist, she followed the traditional Freudian psychoanalysis of her time....only when she found out that this type of therapy does not really solve the problem but intensifies it, did she start developing her own, very different theory....but by that was not until 1970, resulting in her first book, the drama, in 1979...by that time her son was about 30 years old, so how could she protect him from a violent father??? So this criticism is bloody BS!!”

Hi P,
Thank you for writing. I completely agree with everything you wrote. This comment made by Makus Roth in the article sent to me is so true: “Alice Miller's life cycle is comparable to the conversion of Sau to Paul, from the unconscious to the conscious mother. when she wrote the first of her 13 books (drama dbk= Das Drama de begabten Kiindes, The drama of the gifted child), 1979, when her son was already 29 years old and she kept on developing every time clearer and clearer. Already years ago she apologized to her son for her misbehavior in his childhood, whereas her son had and still has trouble with it.” Makus Roth

I feel Alice Miller’s experience is very similar to mine. My love for my ex and my desire to help him made me look for help so we could save our relationship and in the process I freed myself. 

Alice Miller too saw that her son had problems, and how ironic they both have the same name, my ex’s name is also Martin! Alice Miller, like me, started lifting every stone to look for clues to help her son and in the process resolved her own repression and freed herself, just like me, that I went out looking for clues on how to help my Ex and I ended up liberating myself in the process. 

And at the end, I had to let my ex go, and Alice too had to let her son go because once a person is an adult, no one, not even the mother, can make up for what we need as children and we didn’t get. 

Once we are adults only we can save ourselves and anyone that tells us otherwise is fooling us with false hopes and promises. 

Alice Miller was driven to write her books to warn society of the dangers of childhood repression to save the children of the future and help us to face and resolve our own repression. 

This is why it’s so important for people to face their own repression before having children or at least become aware of their own childhood repression before their children become teenagers and adults, because it’s not the trauma itself that causes long-term damage, but the repressed emotions caused by trauma that causes long term damage and if parents became aware of the damage done before their children became teenagers or adults, then they can help their children express their true feelings of anger, fear and hurt, because the children are still emotionally dependent on their parents, but once the children become teenagers or adults the defense mechanisms and walls have been built and it’s out of the parents' hands, they can become the most conscious parents, but it will be too late, because they can’t force the teenagers and adult children remove the walls to face and feel their childhood repression, if they don’t wish to do so. To warn us, Alice Miller made herself very vulnerable to all the full-blown malignant narcissists, sociopaths, bad players,  psychopaths, assholes, or whatever you like to call NOW these very evil people in the world -- her courage is astonishing! 

And as Alice Miller wrote in the answers below to one of her readers:

"I am also glad that you have the hope that we can pass on our knowledge to the masses. I had this hope 30 years ago when I wrote the Drama. I thought that showing the truth can change so much. Meanwhile, I became more skeptical or just more impatient after I discovered the fear of the beaten child in all of us that built up the omnipresent resistance against the truth." Alice Miller

(Me too I had the hope with the writing of my book would help pass this knowledge to the masses, but like Alice Miller, I have become skeptical and with the writing of my book I too learned that people's repressed fears at their parents build omnipresent resistance against the truth. And people rather destroy others than face and consciously feel their own repressed fears to see the truth. And this is why I have been harassed, prosecuted, and ostracized since I can remember and in the workplace by very bad players since I published my book. I understand people's fears of their childhood pain that have been trying to keep repressed all of their lives, but it is still disappointing that pretty much everyone I meet doesn't have the courage to face their fears and become real)   

Psychopaths/sociopaths always feed on people's weaknesses to advance themselves and don’t care who they hurt, step on and destroy in the process as long as they get what they want. 

In the interview Martin Miller is giving in the link sent me, he is speaking in German and of course, I don’t understand what he is saying, but the body never lies and the language of the body is universal, his body is telling his truth and you can see how this man has been repressing all of his life with the aid of food and probably also with all kinds of medications, and never allowed himself to consciously feel the full range of the repressed feelings of the child he once was within the context of his own childhood. 

And as long as we go on repressing our feelings the compulsion to abuse ourselves, others or both will go on endless overtly or covertly and you can see he has been abusing himself by overeating to numb his feelings when present situations trigger him because he is extremely overweight.  

The title of his book is “The true drama of the gifted child- the tragedy of Alice Miller” but the title of his book should have been: “The Drama of the gifted child - the tragedy of my life” because his life is the real tragedy and sad beyond words, because he still stuck in his childhood and probably will never break free, because he is already 63 and the older we get hard it gets to resolve our repression. 

Alice Miller’s life is not a tragedy, because she broke free and died free, the beginning of her life was a tragedy, but not the end of her life, she became honest with herself and others and that is the most important achievement anyone can reach in this lifetime, not like most people in our society that are stuck in their childhood pretending and acting as if personality their whole lives, fooling themselves and others. 

As Alice says in her book The Body Never Lies, page, 86: ““… For how can I prove to someone that freedom is within reach if all his life he has clung to the constraints that were necessary for his survival and if he cannot imagine life without those constraints? I can say that I myself have achieved such freedom by getting to the bottom of my own story, but I have to admit that I am not a good example. After all, it took me over forty years to arrive at the stage I have reached now. But there are others. I know people who have succeeded in unearthing their memories in a much shorter space of time, and the discovery of their own truth has enabled them to emerge from the autistic hiding place that used to be their only refuge. In my case, the reason the journey took so long was that I was on my own for most of it.”

Me too, just like Alice Miller it took me over forty years to break free because I was alone in my journey most of it.

Also, read my blogs in the links below:
Letter to P About Martin Miller's book
The Pain of a Mother
In Most Cases is a Lie
Don’t let Others Exploit your Repressed Anger to do Harm
Psychoanalysis and most therapies hinder people’s liberation and autonomy
Open letter to Martin Miller