As weird and as dangerous as the world around me could get sometimes, I always tried hard to stay above it all. And even though everyone knew that I was pretty conservative, I did my best not to judge what I heard about the things other girls did at the club or on the side. If someone wanted to be a “dancer/prostitute” or a “waitress/prostitute,” that was their business. However, I never understood how some of the waitresses could have a problem with dancing, but were perfectly fine having sex for money. In all my years as a dancer, only one girl was completely honest with me about her extracurricular activities. I appreciated her candor, and when she had a relationship problem I was happy to let her crash at my house for a few days. The whole time I listened to her project all her hatred into men. Man bashing was a favorite pastime of most of the dancers, which I found kind of ironic because they were being paid to please people they absolutely despised. I couldn’t have done my job if I blamed men in general for my problems. Frankly, I think that’s a cop-out. For me, keeping my nose clean at Bourbon Street was a good decision. I didn’t want to get used up by getting involved with gambling, drugs, or a futile search for a sugar daddy like so many of my colleagues did. Besides, dancing always made me feel free. I enjoyed being able to move. I liked to flirt a little bit. And it was no problem for me to enforce a policy of not dating the customers. That is, until Marty came around. He was a Greek god. An Adonis. A Leonardo DiCaprio clone whose cool vibe and raw animal magnetism drove every girl at Bourbon Street wild. Marty could have had any dancer he wanted, but he chose me. It was probably because I was so hard to get, and I have to admire him for his persistence. He pursued me for nearly a year, and I finally succumbed to his charms by telling him he no longer had to pay me to dance for him.
Since he was no longer a customer, we could start dating. For a variety of reasons, my relationship with Marty ranks among both the worst and the best experiences of my life. Even though he was 11 years my junior, Marty had a strange effect on me in more ways than one. Our relationship was passionate and intense, and the sex was like something out of the Kama Sutra. When I could lose myself in the ecstasy of our physical acrobatics, I was in heaven. But the rest of the relationship was a living hell. As I would eventually discover, Marty managed to trigger all of the pent-up emotions I had repressed as a neglected child. My reactions to his numerous affairs — and his ultimate rejection of me for someone else — were repeat performances of struggles I had had with my parents, siblings and other authority figures who had control over me as a young child. Of course, I didn’t know this at first. I didn’t know why I was so hopelessly attracted to Marty, even though he was a womanizer who took advantage of me every chance he got. I didn’t understand why I kept going back for more and more of his mistreatment. I had no idea why I kept buying him expensive presents or lending him money for drugs. It really didn’t make sense why his love and approval mattered so much to me. I’d been dumped before — and I had dumped my share of guys, too — but none of my romantic relationships had ever been this overwhelming.
Just as I did when I was little, I tried to fix things. I tried to fix Marty. I tried to fix myself. I tried just about everything — from therapy and 12-step groups to Oprah-style forgiveness and positive thinking — but nothing worked. I was in utter despair because I just couldn’t find a solution. I didn’t know that the answer was already inside me, in the memory of the little girl who was treated in the same cruel way by her parents, her sisters and brothers, and her teachers. I got a glimmer of hope one day when I started reading a book by Alice Miller. This remarkable woman — a renowned psychologist and author of 13 books — literally changed my life. Her ideas about how people repress traumatic experiences that occur in childhood — and then relentlessly repeat them in their adult interactions — spoke to me more clearly than anyone or anything else had ever done. Alice Miller made me feel that I wasn’t alone anymore. She showed me that the cause of my fear and pain wasn’t Marty after all. He was just a trigger of the intense feelings of hurt and anger I kept locked away, which were never allowed to find true expression when they first occurred. The real causes of my problems were the repressed emotions of the little girl I once was. And she demanded attention in the here and now. One of the reasons I love Alice Miller so much is because she’s the only person I’ve encountered on this planet who was 100 percent honest, courageous, and real. She sticks to the facts and doesn’t preach to anyone. She tells it like it is. Her words taught me to see how the pressure to create a false self as a child — in order to cope with the crazy adults in my life — was damaging me as an adult. She explained how I had become a prisoner of my childhood. And she guided me through a powerful journey that freed me from the consequences of old wounds.
My list of childhood traumas was pretty long. In fact, I had just about every disadvantage in life that you could think of. I grew up in a poor village in Portugal, the daughter of a drunken father and an exhausted mother who never got over the death of three of her ten children. I was the youngest child in my family, and I was born when my oldest sibling was 25. By the time I came around, the last thing my parents, brothers and sisters wanted was another mouth to feed. I was very delicate as a baby, and very vulnerable to illness as a young child. I nearly died of hepatitis when I was seven years old. That episode was so bad that I had to spend an entire year at home when I should have been starting school. I was a burden on the family and the focus of great resentment. When I finally started school, other issues came to the surface, including a severe learning disability. My inability to do schoolwork was another embarrassment to my family, and it gave the harsh Catholic teacher who led my class conniption fits. Let’s just say she acted in a very unloving way toward me, which reflected very poorly on the religious teachings of her church. At an early age, organized religion turned me away from God. Religion felt like a straitjacket keeping me down. Just like Alice Miller, I was “unable to fathom God’s motives,” and, in my own way, came to the same conclusion she did, that the God of the Bible was perverse and cruel. “The Bible was written by men,” Alice Miller writes. “We must assume that those men had been through some unpleasant experiences at the hands of their fathers. Surely none of them had had a father who took pleasure in their inquiring minds, realized the futility of expecting the impossible of them and refrained from punishing them. That was why they were able to create an image of God with sadistic features that did not strike them as such. God, as they saw Him, devised a cruel scenario in which He gave Adam and Eve the tree of knowledge but at the same time forbade them to eat its fruit — that is, to achieve awareness and become autonomous personalities. He wanted to keep them entirely dependent on Him.”1
My difficulties were especially problematic in a family that claimed to value religion and education above pretty much everything else. I was the one kid in the family who wouldn’t toe the line and behave the way I was supposed to. I was wild at heart with an expansive spirit. And to my parents and older siblings who were responsible for taking care of me, this spelled trouble with a capital “T.” Throughout my childhood, family members told me that I wasn’t good enough, smart enough or polite enough. I never did the right thing. Under the strict rule of two of my sisters, Elza, the oldest child, and Laura, the third oldest, I acted out by being rebellious and withdrawn. These sisters — my substitute parents — were exasperated with my behavior. When their efforts to control me through harsh words, humiliation, and even medication failed, they pretty much rejected me and made their displeasure with me even more widely known. By the time I was a teenager, I was in emotional turmoil. Like most children ruled by authoritarians, I was forced to repress my true feelings and believe that I was the problem. My caregivers ignored my childhood feelings in an effort to gain the upper hand, and I believe that’s true of most people raising children today. Alice Miller taught me that children tend to idealize the people who are supposed to love them, even when they don’t. It’s a coping mechanism that children use because they can’t afford to face the truth of not being loved when they’re so young, vulnerable, and unable to survive on their own.
Everyone around me reinforced the idea that I was the one who was wrong, which led me to resent my sister Isabel.
She was three years older than me and was also raised by Elza and Laura, who constantly held her up as the model of perfect behavior. She was the heroine of the family, and I was the villain. I didn’t know then that Isabel’s obedience and compliance were just her ways of coping with the same oppressive authority figures. Just recently, Isabel complained to my sister Elza that she was jealous of me because my illnesses and bad behavior kept stealing the spotlight from her when we were kids. I can imagine that Isabel felt extremely traumatized when she saw our mother pregnant with me, this new baby who would take her place. Isabel was only three when I was born, and no one was available to help her deal with her feelings. So she developed her own false self, which made her do everything she could to please adults in order to get their attention. It worked as a child, but as an adult she’s stuck in her own emotional prison, perpetuating the vicious circle and passing it on to the next generation. Until she frees herself to start down the path toward her true self, she’ll continue taking refuge in delusions of grandeur that hurt everyone around her.
Elza and Laura may have meant well when they were raising me, but all their efforts were geared toward making me something I was not. Truth be told, I wasn’t even that bad of a kid! I was a hard worker and very disciplined, but because I wasn’t book smart and didn’t believe in God, my positive qualities were overlooked. If my substitute mothers had just tried to meet me where I was, things may have worked out differently. Instead, they constantly picked on me, told me that I’d never be good at anything, and made it clear that I was ultimately going to hell. Once they even got an old friend of theirs to remove the “bad spirits” that had taken over my body! When that didn’t work, they turned to one of Portugal’s leading psychotherapists, a dashing young doctor who today is a national hero, kind of like Dr. Phil is in the United States. All this doctor seemed to want from me was a blow job, and I went along just to spite my sisters. I’ll tell you more about this Prince Charming later. As a result of a collection of bad experiences that were never acknowledged, explained, or discussed, I was pretty much a hot mess when it was time to enter the real world.
For a while, I was able to escape my family and the emotional hold they had on me. I went to London to work as an au pair, and ultimately moved to the United States on a fiancée visa. When my friend backed out of the marriage plan, I got hitched to another guy I had met in London. The problem with him was that he really wanted to be my husband. I was very honest with him about not wanting a relationship, but he seemed to think we’d be able to work it out. A year after getting married, I got a divorce and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. In Arizona’s urban heart, I found my calling at Bourbon Street. And then, five years into my career, I met Marty. While I was in that relationship, I thought I was on a rollercoaster ride from hell, but looking back, it was an incredible journey of discovery — thanks to a lot of help from Alice Miller and her wonderful books. Alice Miller helped me see that there’s only one true way to achieve freedom. This requires really feeling the repressed emotions of childhood for the first time. Children can’t process the fact that their parents were incapable of love, so they learn to deny the truth in an effort to survive. They create an illusion of love when they’re young, but this illusion can be severely damaging if it doesn’t jibe with reality.
However, as adults, we all have the potential to reclaim our truth and free ourselves from lies and illusions. I’ll be very honest with you: Following my path to freedom wasn’t an easy process for me. As Alice Miller writes, “Inevitably, resistance to following this path is great, as we all fear our repressed past and the experience of how helpless we once were. We have had good reason to be afraid; if we did not, there would have been no need for repression. Yet the more we encounter our fear and dare to see its causes, the more it decreases.”2 When I was finally ready to face my repressed rage and fear — after years of reading Alice Miller and absorbing her teachings — it took me months of being a virtual recluse before I was able to push through the pain and find myself free on the other side. It felt like my chest was being ripped apart by a knife, and I can’t tell you how many boxes of Kleenex I went through. But as hard as it was, I’m a much better person for having faced — and felt — my true feelings.
Today, I’m much happier, and it’s very hard to rattle me. Freedom has a price, but it’s totally worth it. If I didn’t have Alice Miller to help me connect the dots and understand the real roots of my pain, at some point I probably would have shut down completely. In fact, I had already shut down when I was a little girl in order to survive, and I tried to commit suicide on more than one occasion. The raw pain buried deep inside me, which was triggered years later with great intensity when Marty finally left me, was my opportunity to wake up and become fully alive again. After spending ten years with Marty, I finally became too smart for him. Gone were the days when he could manipulate and fool me. I was no longer willing, or able, to
live with his lies and be his secret. He either had to get real with me or leave. And because he couldn’t be honest and truthful, he split. Being left by this man, who was just like my dad in that he couldn’t stand up for himself or for me, forced me to face and feel the raw pain of being emotionally abandoned and unloved as a child.
I was able to find genuine forgiveness and understanding by acknowledging what was really done to me as a child, and by gaining insights into why my parents, sisters and others couldn’t help doing what they did. As Alice Miller says, “Such forgiveness cannot be coerced by rules and commandments; it is experienced as a form of grace and appears spontaneously when a repressed (because forbidden) hatred no longer poisons the soul.”3
If you haven’t guessed it already from my career choice, I’m the type of person who naturally attracts — and for the most part likes — attention. And I don’t just mean that in a sexual way. Wherever I am, I seem to be able to strike up a conversation with anyone who crosses my path. I’m perfectly willing to talk to people and help them out if I can. In my exchanges with men and women from all walks of life, I’ve found that so many of us remain lost little children, looking and waiting for a substitute mother or father figure to save us. But that can never happen because no one can make up for what we didn’t get when we were young. As adults, we have the ability within ourselves to finally become a loving mother or father to the lost child still inside us, with the help of an enlightened — or knowing — witness. Alice Miller was mine. Ignoring our childhood truth, Alice Miller says, “makes us act destructively even though we do not really want to do so.”4 Some people become abusers, lashing out at others (especially their own children) because they couldn’t confront their own oppressors. Some people become pros at manipulating others, using illnesses caused by their unresolved childhood emotions to get people to take care of them like their parents never did. And some people, like me, simply let the repressed emotions of the child they once were sabotage their lives when stressful situations come up.
Before Alice Miller died in 2010, I was lucky enough to have had an email correspondence with her that lasted about two years. She wrote to me once that the rage of an adult — who attacks others out of a denial of his or her history — can never be resolved because it’s directed at scapegoats. She told me that therapists who don’t allow patients to confront their childhood feelings are actually doing great harm. “Staying trapped in the hatred toward scapegoats can’t be the
successful end of therapy,” she wrote to me. But the expression and release of legitimate rage, directed at the real abusers, can be the beginning of a successful life.
This is why all of us need a path — or a dance, if you will — to freedom. Once you explore your truth, incredible things can start to happen. Chronic symptoms, mental as well as physical, can start to disappear. As Alice Miller writes, we can “claim health, clarity and independence for ourselves. Claim them, and maintain them. Only thus can we keep our feet on firm ground, and not be dependent on drugs, gurus, groups or theories that teach us how to change our past.”5 The dirty little secret is that we can’t change the things that happened to us. But we can find the courage to face them, mourn our past and move forward. If a person like me — with no formal education or special talents — can do it, then you can, too. This book, along with all or any of Alice Miller’s books, can be an enlightened witness that helps you with your own dance to freedom.
When I started corresponding with Alice Miller in the last years of her life, I told her that I wanted to help her spread the word about her discoveries. No one who wants the truth should have to wait as long as I did. And that’s why I wrote this book. It’s both a tribute to Alice Miller and a guide to her ideas. I’m not a therapist, and I don’t want to be anyone’s therapist. But I do want to help people as a friend would, by sharing my experiences and explaining how Alice Miller helped me heal when everything else failed. If you struggle with anger, resentment, depression, addiction, disease, or a bad relationship, Alice Miller can help you gain what you missed as a child — “truthfulness, clarity and respect for yourself and others.”6 I’ve done a lot of the legwork for you, and if you can learn from my story, you can avoid many of the mistakes I made during my own dance to freedom. You can find your freedom a lot sooner than I did. It’s time to liberate yourself from the victim role you fell into as a child when you lacked the resources you needed to take care of yourself and stand up to your oppressors. I’m living proof that Alice Miller’s ideas work. And I’m happy to share my dance to freedom with you in the hope that it
inspires you to start your own.
1 The Truth Will Set You Free, p. 7–8
2 The Drama of the Gifted Child (1994), p. 25
3 For Your Own Good, p. 248
4 The Drama of the Gifted Child (1994), p. 9
5 Ibid., p. 13–14
6 The Drama of the Gifted Child (1994), p. 26
