I have no doubt that Alice Miller's son Martin Miller was the trigger for all of Alice Miller's books. And if he had not been born we would not have had Alice Miller's enlightened books to help us liberate ourselves from the emotional prison of our own childhoods. And I would probably be dead NOW or still living in an emotional prison. He is just like a double-edged sword.
Martin Miller's book is nothing but smoke and mirrors. So sad to witness that Martin Miller joined forces with all those that betrayed his Mother, while she was still alive, trying to stand on Alice Miller's head to make a name for themselves. And didn't reach out to anyone that is standing by the side of his mother.
All they accuse Alice Miller of, that's exactly what they themselves are doing. They don't take responsibility for their own unresolved childhood repression and have mastered the art of projection and transference to perfection.
Throughout Alice Miller's books, she gives windows into the struggles she had with her adult son and how she tried to help him, but once children reach adulthood it's too late -- and no one can help adults children, not even their own mothers. Once we reach adulthood we are responsible for our own healing and Alice Miller with her books gives us the enlightened information to guide us through our own healing.
"As a child, I had to learn to suppress my entirely natural responses to the injuries inflicted on me, responses like rage, anger, pain, and fear. Otherwise, I would have been punished. Later, at school, I was proud of the skill I had developed in controlling and restraining these feelings. I considered this ability a virtue, and I also expected my first child to achieve the same kind of discipline. Only after I succeeded in freeing myself of this attitude was I able to understand the suffering of children who have been forbidden to respond to injuries in an appropriate way and to engage with their emotions in a benevolent environment, so that in later life they can take their bearings from the feelings they actually have, rather than fearing them." Alice Miller
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2022/07/drugs-and-deception-of-body.html
And yet I still feel a need to share with others things that came to me only late in life. The result does not claim to be literature, we are not dealing here with “art for art.” For my stories are actually based on simple, conscious intentions to inform people and encourage them to think. For me, as for many women, it was very painful to realize that as a young mother I had missed so much, not only for my child but also for myself, simply because I did not know enough. It hurts to see how with more information many things could have turned out better and that much cannot be made good again. My stories arose from the wish to spare other people what I have suffered myself.” Alice Miller ~ Paths of Life, preface
Also confirms Barbara Rogers' IFS therapy does not work either, because if it worked she would not be stuck in her childhood drama anymore and would not be reenacting her childhood drama endless by exploiting others the same way she was exploited when she was a defenseless child. Just like Alice said: it takes courage to face and feel our painful truths, intelligence alone is not enough, but it rather helps create a lot of seductive lies.
It’s her problem if she is still a lost little girl and loses herself in admiration over others, she is another malignant narcissist that has memorized good knowledge hijacked from Alice Miller's books, but has not experienced it at a personal level and now is trying to cast herself in the role of parent figure over others and misuses this good knowledge to manipulate and use others as poison containers to distract herself, so she does not have to face and feel the repressed excruciating emotions of the child she once was; reenacting her childhood drama all over again with the people she is trying to help, but now she playing the role of her mother and the people she is trying to help, playing the role of the child she and they once were and they all remain lost in a maze with no way out, staying prisoners of childhood for eternity.
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2012/08/daniel-mackler-and-barbara-rogers-came.html
And at the end, I had to let Marty 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 crucial 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, like Alice Miller did, but it will be too late, because they can’t force the teenagers and adult children to remove the walls to face and feel their childhood repression, if they don’t wish to do so.
In an interview Martin Miller gave, he was 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 in his sixties and the older we get hard it gets to resolve our own repression.
Alice Miller’s life is not a tragedy, because she broke free and died free, the beginning of her life was a tragedy, just like most people's lives, 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.”
Reviewed in the United
States on June 2, 2020
This may be the most peevish, callous, and unsympathetic biography of a Holocaust survivor ever written. Mr. Miller is clearly angry at his mother, and surely he has a right to be if, as he alleges, she was emotionally unavailable to him in his youth. But in recounting his mother's near-death and the destruction of her entire family during the Holocaust, he makes far more references to his own feelings than to hers.
He uses words like "shocked",
"stunned" and "amazed", but always in reference to his own
reaction to the inevitable omissions and inconsistencies in her story. The
death of his grandparents in the ovens does not stun him. The possibility of
his mother having been raped by kidnappers at one point does not stun him. But
the fact that she chose not mention all this in a blurb on her website in 2010?
Stunning, he reports.
Clearly, Ms. Miller is an important figure in psychology, and it is
understandable for readers to want to know the background that inspired her
work.
But while Mr. Miller is clearly well-placed to
reveal that information, the job ought to fall to someone who possesses some
iota of empathy and doesn't "identify with abusers", as Mr. Miller
openly confesses to doing in his work as a psychologist.
Put more simply, any time you find yourself nitpicking how someone survived the
Holocaust, even your own mother, you probably ought to be ashamed of yourself."
Piggybacking on his mother's fame, yet bringing her down.
Pathetic!!
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2020
First of all, the fact that this "writer" was able
to write a book using all her mother's techniques, indicates very clearly that
said techniques actually work.
I am really sorry to hear that this guy had such a difficult
life with a traumatized mother who seemed to have lacked the ability to
implement her theories with her own son. [Alice Miller could not have implemented
her techniques with her own son -- because she developed her techniques later in
life -- when her son was already an adult in his thirties. Once we reach adulthood
we are responsible for our own healing and Alice Miller with her books gives us the enlightened information to guide us through our own healing] That makes her a
flawed and fallible human being, but that doesn't take away the merits of her
brilliant writings.
Whatever this guy went through in his own childhood, I am
really sorry to hear. But what he is choosing to do with his own pain is a
coward and self-serving strategy to make a name for himself by trashing his
mother, because he knows very well he doesn't even have 1% of the talent, the
courage, the insight, the brilliance that Alice Miller had, both as a healer
(since she didn’t like to be called a psychoanalyst) and as a writer.
To me, it’s very obvious that he is shamelessly piggybacking
on his mother's success and brilliance to make a buck and a name for himself.
The only way he could attract any attention to himself was
by saying "I'm Alice Miller's son". Otherwise, nobody would have
stopped to read anything he wrote. That must be a hard pill to swallow for him,
yet he'll have to swallow it for the rest of his life.
This "Martin the Martyr" guy may have been an
innocent child once upon a time, but as an adult, in my opinion, he is an
untalented, self-serving, and coward. He didn't even have the decency to
preface his book by saying: "I acknowledge that my mother has helped
millions of readers (myself included) overcome the tragic effects of trauma and
of being raised by narcissistic parents. I also acknowledge that she was a
brilliant writer. However, she, herself, didn't have the time or the awareness
to implement her own techniques when she was raising me, so she caused me much
pain. This is the story of my pain."
Instead, he chose to put his mother down (that, I respect),
without taking the time to acknowledge the unquestionable, undeniable,
impressive merits of the writer he's attempting to put down (that, I do not
respect). Whatever he wants to say about Alice Miller, the mother is his
prerogative. But how come he doesn’t have the objectivity to preface all his
comments by acknowledging the merits of the writer he’s criticizing, i.e. his
mother?? Furthermore, how come he cannot at least acknowledge that the mother
he is so disappointed with is the same writer whose tools, techniques, and
theories he’s using to heal his own pain??
Had he had any objectivity, decency, courage, humility, and
more importantly, talent, he would have extensively mentioned, not only the
greatness of his mother’s talent but also the smallness of his own.
If you are the son of Shakespeare, and you tell me that
Shakespeare was a jerk, and all you do is badmouth Shakespeare, and try to sell
books doing that (without acknowledging the brilliance of Shakespeare’s talent)
then I can only entertain two theories:
1) That you are very hurt about what your father did to you.
If this is the case, then, that means you are too emotionally wounded about the
whole thing. It also means you haven't done the necessary emotional work to
recover from your own traumas, either because A) You haven't been able to, B)
Because you lack the courage to do so or C) Because you're in a hurry to try to
extract a benefit from your father's fame and brilliance.
What a coincidence that this guy published this book after
his mother died. He didn't have the courage to publish it while she was alive.
Perhaps he first wanted to make sure he could get his hands on his mother's
will before trashing her, thereby trying to capitalize on both his mother’s
brilliance and success and his cowardly attacks of her. There's always method
in mediocrity.
To me, it is very obvious that, apart from his legitimate
trauma, the bottom line is that this is the drama of the son of a Genius who,
when confronted with the fact that he doesn't even have 1% of his mother's
talent, he felt the sting of envy, and instead of just processing his envy, he
decided to attack the genius with whom he will never be able to compete.
For a person who claims to have such a deep knowledge about
the complexities of people's psyches, I think he missed that small detail about
his own conflicted inner world.
I understand that this guy was emotionally injured, but what
he decided to do with his pain lacked objectivity, contribution, insight, and
talent. He may have had a really bad mother (most of Alice Miller’s readers had
the same experience), but he also happened to be the son of one of the greatest
writers and healers of the 20th century. He forgot to mention that.
The facts still remain: Alice Miller was a brilliant
writer. Her son is a mediocre writer at best. The other fact is that Martin has
made no original contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. I doubt that he
ever will.
If you want to read a valuable, insightful book, pick up one
of Alice Miller's books and enjoy the brilliance of her talented and courageous
mind and heart!!"
"you will never forget a person who came to you with a torch in the dark!"
Amazon deleted some of my book reviews because their algorithms thought they were made by friends from Facebook that I never met in real life, but most five stars reviews made on Martin Miller's book are authentic, Not! I'm so tired of the bias in this world.
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