This week, a reader and correspondent, David, reached out to me after reading Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay about her leukemia diagnosis. He was struck by a quote in which she confessed that, all her life, she had tried to be “good,” never upset her mother, and felt guilty that her illness would now make her mother sad.
David found these words shocking — as we all should. But they are not surprising to me. They reveal the tragic emotional inheritance that so many carry, generation after generation, without ever naming it.
I didn’t read Tatiana’s full essay because I already knew what I would find:
a sad, disconnected story with no resolution — a story shaped by a lifetime of emotional repression. A story in which the body finally presents the bill for the truth the mind has buried.
As Alice Miller wrote:
“The body does not understand moral precepts. It fights against the denial of genuine emotions and for the admission of the truth to our conscious minds. This is something the child cannot afford to do; it has to deceive itself and turn a blind eye to the parents’ crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to do this, but if they do, the price they pay is high.”
Tatiana’s words show us a child who never learned to exist as herself, only as the caretaker of her mother’s emotional world. She believed it was her job to protect her mother from sadness, anger, or disappointment — a complete inversion of the parent-child relationship. And now, in adulthood, she still feels responsible for her mother’s feelings, even to the point of guilt over her own illness.
This is not love.
This is repression.
The Endless Reenactment of Generational Trauma
Tatiana’s story is not hers alone. Her family has been reenacting unresolved trauma for decades. Her mother, Caroline Kennedy, was only five years old when her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. That childhood shock — compounded by emotional invisibility — becomes the silent blueprint for generations.
And last year, Tatiana gave birth to a child who will now grow up emotionally and physically abandoned by a mother who is engulfed in her own unresolved pain. This is not about blame. This is about truth. A child cannot receive what a parent never received.
They are trapped in an endless loop of reenactments, where each generation repeats the emotional blindness of the one before.
Without consciousness, trauma becomes destiny.
When Experts Diagnose Trauma but Preserve Repression
David also asked about Gabor Maté’s When the Body Says No. I haven’t read it. I don’t feel compelled to. I already know the landscape it traverses, a landscape Alice Miller mapped decades earlier with incomparable clarity and courage — yet Maté rarely, if ever, speaks her name.
Even the title of his book echoes hers: The Body Never Lies (2005).
Maté, like many professionals today, offers accurate diagnoses but misguided solutions. They identify childhood trauma, yet when it comes to healing, they guide people right back into the tools of repression: meditation, yoga, 12-step spiritualizing, psychiatric drugs. These may soothe symptoms, but they never confront the emotional truth.
They teach people once again to manipulate and suppress their feelings — which guarantees that the repetition compulsion will continue.
As I’ve written before, and as my own life has proven:
It is not the trauma itself that destroys us — it is the repression of our authentic feelings.
Illness as the Body’s Final Cry for Truth
Autoimmune diseases, rare cancers, mysterious chronic conditions — these are not random events. They are the body’s rebellion against a lifetime of emotional denial. When a child lives in an environment where their truth is too dangerous to express, the body absorbs the unuttered pain.
As adults, we are no longer helpless children.
But many continue to live as if they are.
Tatiana’s guilt, her self-erasure, her inability to express anger, grief, or disappointment — these are not personality traits. They are survival mechanisms. And survival mechanisms carried into adulthood become destruction mechanisms.
Some destroy their health.
Some destroy others.
Some destroy the next generation.
The Courage to Break the Cycle
I see in Tatiana’s essay what I have seen across my entire life and in every human story I’ve ever studied through the lens of Alice Miller: unresolved childhood pain, unexamined loyalty to parental illusion, and the tragic belief that being “good” is the path to love.
Being good is not the same as being authentic.
Being obedient is not the same as being alive.
The body never forgets this difference.
If we want to heal — truly heal — we must stop protecting our parents' illusions and start protecting our inner child’s truth. That is the path to freedom. Anything else is another turn in the cycle of reenactment.
I wish Tatiana and her family no harm. I wish them consciousness.
But consciousness cannot be borrowed or inherited.
It must be chosen — often in the face of enormous fear — to face and consciouly feel our repressed, painful emotions.
As long as society rewards repression and elevates the voices of those who keep people asleep, tragedies like these will continue. But the roots are not unknown. Alice Miller named them clearly decades ago. The human body reveals them even when the mind refuses.
The truth is always there, waiting.
The question is whether we are willing to see it.
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