24 Quotes by Alice Miller
Alice Miller was a Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst known for her work on childhood trauma and the effects of abusive parenting. Her books, including "The Drama of the Gifted Child" and "For Your Own Good," challenged traditional psychoanalytic theories and emphasized the importance of empathy, compassion, and understanding in child-rearing. Miller's work has been influential in the fields of psychology and child development and has helped to raise awareness about the long-term effects of childhood abuse and neglect. (Bio)
Alice Miller Quotes
Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn. (Meaning)
Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.
Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.
someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, but which we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to.
For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.
It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.
Child abuse is still sanctioned — indeed, held in high regard — in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents.
If we do not work on all three levels -- body, feeling, mind -- the symptoms of our distress will keep returning, as the body goes on repeating the story stored in its cells until it is finally listened to and understood.
Disrespect is the weapon of the weak. (Meaning)
We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.
An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.
Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.
Society chooses to disregard the mistreatment of children, judging it to be altogether normal because it is so commonplace.
The only possible recourse a baby has when his screams are ignored is to repress his distress, which is tantamount to mutilating his soul, for the result is an interference with his ability to feel, to be aware, and to remember.
Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.
Courage can be just as infectious as fear.
The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.
The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.
We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.
If a mother respects both herself and her child from his very first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others.
Empathy grows as we learn.
Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.
Problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience.
― Alice Miller Quotes
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Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
