ALICE MILLER QUOTES
– There was a mother/parent who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her narcissistic equilibrium on the child behaving, or acting, in a particular way.
– The child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively, that is, unconsciously, to this need of the mother, or of both parents, for him to take on the role that had unconsciously been assigned to him.
– This role secured “love” for the child—that is, his parents’ narcissistic cathexis. He could sense that he was needed and this, he felt, guaranteed him a measure of existential security.
“As I think back over my last twenty years’ work, in the light of my present understanding, I can find no patient whose ability to experience his true feelings was not seriously impaired.”
“For the majority of sensitive people, the true self remains deeply and thoroughly hidden.”
“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood. Is it possible then, with the help of psychoanalysis, to free ourselves altogether from illusions? History demonstrates that they sneak in everywhere, that every life is full of them—perhaps because the truth often would be unbearable. And yet, for many people the truth is so essential that they must pay dearly for its loss with grave illness.”
“That probably greatest narcissistic wound—not to have been loved just as one truly was—cannot heal without the work of mourning. It can either be more or less successfully resisted and covered up (as in grandiosity and depression) or constantly torn open again in the compulsion to repeat.”
“Before he can develop his own form of criticism he first adopts his father’s hated vocabulary or nagging manner. And so the long repressed anxiety will surface in—of all things!—his mother’s irritating hypochondriacal fears. It is as if the ‘badness’ in the parents that had caused a person the most suffering in his childhood and that he had always wanted to shun has to be discovered within himself, so that reconciliation will become possible. Perhaps this also is part of the never-ending work of mourning that this personal stamp must be accepted as part of one’s own fate before one can become at least partially free.”
(I had to look up cathexis in the dictionary. It means “Concentration of emotional energy on an idea or object.”)
After rereading this last quote, I had an “Aha!” moment. So that’s what I was intuiting when I wrote about my therapy with Beth:
“What is it that I’m not allowed to express—my own craziness? Keep those psychic hobgoblins hidden, those two-headed, twelve-toed tenants of my head—bitterness, paranoia, self-pity. Must I then, always and only, manifest what is sane and sound and good and right?
That’s why I needed a safe place to express those ”uglier” feelings—because healing involves discovering, exploring, and accepting the darker aspects of your parents in yourself.