Lifting Every Stone: How Love Led Me to Freedom

I’m very proud of my journey. Through everything—betrayals, heartbreak, institutional abuse—I never lost sight of love and truth. Even when the world tried to bury my voice, I never stopped searching. I never stopped feeling.

It was my love for Marty that set it all in motion. I wanted to save our relationship. I didn’t go looking for myself—I went looking for answers to help him. But in that process, I ended up liberating me.

I find it uncanny, almost poetic, that Alice Miller’s journey began in the same way. Her son’s name was Martin, too. She saw his pain, and she started lifting every stone in search of the truth. And like me, she didn’t stop until she found it.

What a strange mirror life can be. Two women, each in her own time, each moved by love for a man named Martin. Each confronting unbearable truths. And each discovering that the one who needed rescuing wasn’t him—it was herself.

In the end, I had to let Marty go. And Alice had to let her Martin go, too. Because once we become adults, no one—not even a mother, not even a lover—can undo what was done to us in childhood. No one can give us now what we didn’t get then. We have to face our pain ourselves. Anyone who tells us otherwise is selling false hope.

Alice Miller wrote her books not for fame or acclaim, but to warn humanity. She wanted to help us see the devastating impact of childhood repression, and how it damages generation after generation unless someone finally says, Enough. She made herself vulnerable to ridicule, to attack, to the darkest projections of the emotionally blind. Her courage still takes my breath away.

And yet, even she grew weary of humanity’s resistance:

"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 could 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 hope that the truth in A Dance to Freedom would wake people up. That they’d recognize themselves in my story and start to question their inherited lies. But like Alice, I’ve grown skeptical. The resistance is massive. The fear is deep.

Still, I write. Still, I speak. Because someone out there will hear. Someone out there is like I once was—hurting, searching, and not yet broken.

To that person, I say:
Lift every stone.
Don’t stop until you find the truth.
And if you lose people along the way, let them go.

Because you’re worth saving.
And you’re the only one who can do it.