myclippedwings

ran out of +1's Also I want to mention that my abusive family members always take the opportunity to intimidate and scare their children to the point of crying and they actually find it funny that they are able to do this. It's like some sort of insecure power trip

I absolutely loved this post!!! Essentially it's the spurned, abused and neglected child within we have to rescue and then we will finally start to have empathy for ourselves, our children and for others, this is how you stop the cycle of abuse, by recognising your own history and abuse and being an "enlightened witness" to yourself. By finally recognising and admitting the pain of your own abusive childhood. Thank you so much for this post I enjoyed reading it and I feel that in making this post you are being an "enlightened witness" to others and me included. Recognising the abuse experienced and feeling the "forbidden" anger our parents never allowed us to feel is what makes the difference as it's the way you start to gain the courage to be your full authentic self and stop self erasing and sacrificing yourself for your internalised parents and abusers. The rebellion against your internalised abusive parents genuinely happens from within, not externally. I have seen many people behave in rebellious ways externally such as in criminal or delinquent behaviour, but it gives them no genuine escape from their fear of their internalised abusive parents. This is true for myself as well, no matter how much I tried to escape my abusive childhood history through addiction or dissociative behaviours, it did not give me a genuine escape from my history, rather I was controlled by my history. I've learned that genuinely escaping my abusive childhood history lies in accepting it for what it is and confronting it, that's the only way I found myself to be free from compulsively repeating my addictions and self destructive behaviour. This is why I really appreciate posts like these, because it affirms to me that, no, I'm not alone with my abusive history and it is not my fault for not meeting my abusive parent's needs and expectations of me. It makes it easier to start looking at myself and my pain again, rather than ignore it out of fear. The fear of the internalised abusive parent recedes because it is easier to feel it and recognise it for what it is Thank you

Drew couldn't have said it any better, your anger is there for a reason, try to feel it consciously and understand it.

Honestly, I feel that Mackler has probably only read The Drama of The Gifted Child and based all of his work on his impression of just this one book of her. But I forgot about the Mackler interviews, they were quite good, just that they only seemed to focus on just one of her books.

Alice Miller: -The Body Never Lies -The Drama of The Gifted Child -Free From Lies: Discovering Your True Needs -The Truth Will Set You Free Nathaniel Branden: -The Six Pillars of Self Esteem -The Psychology of Self Esteem What both Alice Miller and Nathaniel Branden have in common is that they both recognise that the child abuse causes emotional repression and dysfunction which is caused very early on in life when parents teach children implicitly or explicitly that their own emotions are not only a threat to themselves but to their parents. A person can spend their whole life fearing the emotions behind their addiction, depression and dysfunction and not realise that the key to health is asking themselves what these emotions are trying to tell them about their life or their parents. I find it very sad that a life can be spent "sleepwalking" through life due to emotional repression, rather than consciously and actively living it. That said, the two books that helped me the most were The Drama of the Gifted Child and The Body Never Lies, here's why. The Body Never Lies: Summary "An examination of childhood trauma and its surreptitious, debilitating effects by one of the world's leading psychoanalysts. Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness—be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases. Never one to shy away from controversy, Miller urges society as a whole to jettison its belief in the Fourth Commandment and not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives. In this empowering work, writes Rutgers professor Philip Greven, "readers will learn how to confront the overt and covert traumas of their own childhoods with the enlightened guidance of Alice Miller." How it helped me -This book taught me that the symptoms I suffer from, such as depression or addiction are an attempt by my own body to make me pay attention to very important emotions I have been ignoring out of fear of what truth I might discover about myself or my life. More importantly, the pent up rage towards my parents that I had previously never consciously experienced. I have found this to be true as every time I revert to ignoring my emotions, I get compulsive behaviours such as nail biting, compulsive chewing, suppressing hunger or addictive behaviours such as playing video games excessively, wasting huge chunks of time on trivial things etc. These symptoms have been like a plague in my life but whenever I question myself, slow down a bit and just pay attention to what I feel, the negative emotions that I have been escaping for so long return and I feel in pain, but my compulsive, addictive behaviours (my symptoms) go away. I feel grounded in myself and I start to understand why I have these behaviours and I feel more conscious and sentient and not depressed and numb anymore. Not only that but I always notice that when I ignore my emotions to an extreme degree, I start to get the flu every single time. You can only really test this for yourself, but it has turned out to true in my case. Overall this book taught me to take my feelings seriously and to listen to my body after a life time of trivialising them and taking them for granted. And more importantly, to consciously feel my rage, rather than to let it be expressed in illness or dysfunctional behaviour towards myself or others. The Drama of The Gifted Child: Summary "Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided thousands of readers with an answer—and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents’ expectations and win their ”love.” Alice Miller writes, ”When I used the word ’gifted’ in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb… Without this ’gift’ offered us by nature, we would not have survived.” But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth." How it helped me -This book finally explained why my sense of self depended on other people's admiration of me so much. It explained that my parents raised me to seek their admiration which I confused with love and as a result, I developed a sense of self wholly dependant on other's admiration of me, a "false self". And it also explained why I've always ignored myself and my own needs in favour of my parent's or other people's needs. Now I recognise that my striving for "success" was more to do with me "earning" my parent's admiration and "love", rather than out of my own self interest. And most importantly, this book has taught me to develop a sense of self based on authenticity and integrity with myself. To choose my well being and happiness over sacrificing it to meet my parent's or others expectations or needs. To live a life I have chosen for myself, rather than a life chosen for me by others...

This is a good post. But besides the money issue, I don't feel like going to therapy at all. I am fed up of trusting someone else with my history and my emotions and for them to not be taken seriously. I'm just fed up of trying to find a therapist who doesn't blame me for the negative feelings I might have towards my parents or one who remains "neutral" in the face of my despair. This is the experience I had with counselling and I'm staying away from CBT which would mainly focus on my behaviour rather than my childhood. I would still try to look for the "right" therapist, but for now in the mean time the only problem to be solved I see is emotional repression, which you can do on your own. It's just harder without a therapist, but the same problem to be solved in therapy is the same problem you can solve by making the choice understand and listen to your emotions. For now I don't want to go on the hunt for the "right" therapist and I feel much more comfortable dealing with my emotional repression on my own. I don't understand why that is such a problem for some people on here to be honest...

I never realised Stef did a podcast like 1452, I've listened to it and it seems that Stef knows quite a bit about AM as I thought he only read The Drama of The Gifted Child. I'll also see if there's anything else I can find if I do a "peaceful" search. I feel that people don't really look at her books besides the Drama, even though her later books go into far, far more depth into child abuse. Which is why I wished there was a bit more acknowledgement towards her later work or her work in general. As she was not just the writer of the Drama but a staunch peaceful parenting advocate in general. Podcast 1452 was quite good, but I just wish Stef would dedicate podcast highlighting her work.

Hi guys, This has always baffled me since Stef is big on he topic of peaceful parenting and did interviews with people like Robyn Peters Bennett and Elizabeth Gershoff to make the case for peaceful parenting. And although Alice Miller is deceased, I still think that Stef should make a video about her work as I believe that she has been one of the biggest peaceful parenting advocates before the internet age. And was practically all alone in her fight against child abuse and emotional repression. So I'm just a bit surprised why Stef hasn't shined at least a bit of the spotlight on her important work?

Hi, I also just want to say that although the Drama of the Gifted Child is a good book in itself, her later books go into vastly more depth about child abuse and emotional repression. So I would highly recommend checking them out. You can find For Your Own Good for free here: http://www.nospank.net/fyog.htm This book focuses more on corporal punishment and its effects though and a bit less on self erasure. So if you want to keep on the topic of self erasure I would check out The Body Never Lies instead

Alice Miller's work can be said to be basically be about child abuse and how it causes an adult to practically live in constant self erasure as a result. The Drama of The Gifted Child is about how children self erase in order to gain their parents admiration which they confuse with real love. And for example The Body Never Lies is about how the body produces symptoms such as illnesses to resist this self erasure. I would highly recommend checking her work out. Abusive parents teach us to give up our own needs in order to meet theirs, the path to emotional health lies in stopping self erasure and getting back to our own needs and emotions. Nathaniel Branden is good too, it's just that his focus is on self esteem rather than child abuse, which I feel is the major underlying root cause. But I would recommend both of these guys as their work is basically about "honoring" the self and stopping the vicious cycle of self erasure. Here's Alice Miller's website with links to books: http://www.alice-miller.com/en/ And here's Nathaniel Branden's website: http://www.nathanielbranden.com/

Perfect answer pretty much. Also, I think cutting welfare is the best option, I mean, yes people will riot and commit violence, but they won't be able to sustain wasting their time and energy rioting and committing violence for long without free money?? So people will eventually give up and just accept the welfare cuts?

Alice Miller has written in her later books (The Truth Will Set You Free/ Free From Lies) about "mind blocks" caused by lesions in the brain, which are caused by child abuse and are observable by brain scans. It seems that these lesions serve the purpose of upholding that person's emotional repression of their child hood history and the abuse they suffered. So she argues that this is why no amount of intellectual information will convince someone to do what they have feared from the earliest years of their lives, which is to see the truth about themselves and their reality at an emotional level, because their parents have beaten this fear into them in order to gain their children's obedience. Children will emotionally deny that they are being abused by their parents since they are dependent on them for survival and want to be loved. So I guess until these people face this fear emotionally and realise there is no danger in being conscious of it, that there is no danger of their parent's (or society's punishment), all avoidance of truth, reason and evidence is essentially the avoidance of this fear, the fear of being punished for seeing/speaking the truth. As Alice Miller calls it "the fear of the next blow"

Natalia, are you into self kowledge? How do you deal with your emotions and feelings? I get this impression that you intellectualise to not feel, honestly?

I'm glad you did man, I feel that this is such a common root of a lot of people's problems with intimacy and romantic relationships, just that pure shame that your parents try to instil on you just for your natural needs. It's as if romantic relationships are "forbidden", dirty or scandalous, it's as if your loyalty should only ever be to your parents. And that if you decide to be loyal to someone else, then you're somehow betraying your loyalty to your parents?? What do you mean by "flavour of the week attitude"?

Intellectual insight is purely just your thoughts divorced from any feelings you have about your situation, while emotional insight is when you pay attention to your feelings about your situation. I think you need your intellectual insight to be able to process your emotional insight, so you need both. Were romantic relationships seen as shameful when growing up? This is very good advise, spot on! That's the thing about shame, my mother always shamed me for pursuing romantic relationships, so me being involved intimately with another girl would trigger feelings of shame and insecurity within me, which is why I also have stayed away from romantic relationships for a long time like Aviet64