Malignant narcissists, 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 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.”
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.
I am so glad I didn’t have children; otherwise, the sociopaths out there might try to use my children to get to me, to try to discredit me and my book, as they do with Alice Miller because if I had children without resolving my childhood repression first, me too, I would not have been a "perfect" mother and without a doubt, my children would have been wounded TOO and vulnerable to be exploited by sociopaths, like Martin Miller is being used by the sociopath Barbara Roges and Daniel Mackler to stand on Alice Miller’s head to make a name for themselves, so they don’t have to face and feel the painful repressed feelings of the child they once were.
When we have children without resolving our childhood repression we will unconsciously transfer into our children our internalized childhood abusers, and then we will face them all over again in our children. Oh, I'm so grateful I didn't repeat this vicious circle.
This is what happened to Alice Miller. she had to let go of her son to protect herself from the full-blown malignant narcissist her son had grown into.
Alice Miller faced in her husband her childhood abusers and then faced them all over again in her own son.
This comment made by Makus Roth 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
In her interview given with Ms. Noreen Taylor. Alice Miller says: "I have two adult children. I never hit them but I was sometimes careless and neglecting to my first child out of ignorance. Fortunately not so much as my parents had been to me. It is very painful to realize that but this realization can also be liberating from a self-deception. I think that the love for the own children can bear the truth and can even thrive on it while lies and denial seed cruelty for the next generation." I read online somewhere Martin Miller complained that his mother disowned him and doesn't know what happened to her money. So he is still dependent on his mother and is mad at his mother for not giving him her money.
Dependency breeds anger, as long we are dependent on the family's money; we remain stuck with them, in their emotional prisons, and hate instead of being resolved increases. We have to work to find our autonomy and not depend on the family or others standing in symbolizing our parents. As long we are dependent on the family or others financially, we remain prisoners of our childhood. Read my blogs Dependency Breeds Anger and Liberating Ourselves from Dependency that Breeds Hatred. Martin Miller saying is not an accusation that’s exactly what it is, disguised as wanting to understand deep-seated trauma. Anyone that has read all his mother’s books and worked through their own repression understands deep-seated trauma and how hard it is to resolve it.
He is being a great example of how difficult it is to resolve deep-seated trauma. He is still stuck in his childhood fighting and competing with his mother to make a name for himself by unconsciously attempting to destroy the great discovers and accomplishments his mother made late in life by stepping on his mother’s head to satisfy his own childhood narcissists needs and letting the unresolved repressed emotions of the child he once was, taking revenge on his mother for the wrongs she did to him when he was a small child by attempting to kill his mother in a symbolic way in the public arena with his book, creating a smokescreen confusing many people already confused looking for a way out of their own labyrinths.
Nothing can anyone ever say take away from the pioneering, courageous, and honest work Alice Miller did. She was a true heroine.
As Alice Miller shared in her article, “The Longest Journey” published on her website: “It has taken me all my life to allow myself to be what I am and to listen to what my inner self is telling me, more and more directly, without waiting for permission from others or currying approval from people symbolizing my parents.”
It took her all of her life, but she did it and exposed the lies and hypocrisy of society. My experience has been the same as Alice Miller.
A reader of Alice Miller wrote to her saying: “Books do not help to break open the prisons, it is true, but there are books that give us the courage to rattle at the prison gates with new courage. Your book is such a one to me.”
--- That is exactly how Alice Miller's books are to me. It has taken me, too, all my life, but thanks to her books as my enlightened witness I was able to gather new and tougher courage to remove the invisible shackles and break free from the emotional prison I was born into.
"This book is shameful.
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.
