PRISONERS OF CHILDHOOD

So why were you such a tortured soul? readers of my memoir may be wondering. I didn’t get an answer myself—well, half of one—until my mid-thirties, when I went back to St. Anthony Park for a Murray High School reunion. And it did come from a therapist, just not one of mine. Right before I left Minnesota, my cousin Mark gave me a book called The Drama of the Gifted Child, originally called Prisoners of Childhood, saying he thought I might find it helpful. I read it on the plane.

In her small book, Alice Miller, a former psychoanalyst, writes that children who are sensitive and empathic may try to take care of an insecure parent by adapting to that parent’s wants and needs—to their own detriment. Which is to say, these children become not who they truly are, but who their parent needs them to be. This sacrifice of one’s “true” self, Miller tells us, is the most painful loss a person can suffer. This is what I’d done instinctively, I came to realize, with both my parents—my mother especially—though, of course, not consciously.

And I would go on to do the same thing in other relationships too—with my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Main, for example. I sensed his insecurity from the start and tried to be the perfect student for his sake. Wanting to reassure him that he was a good teacher, I laughed at his jokes and was determinedly attentive during his instruction, even when he was at his dullest. I actually felt I had to make up for the inattentiveness of my classmates. No wonder I became his pet—though that was never what I wanted. When he wouldn’t give me another day to memorize my Australia oral report, it felt like a betrayal. Why? Because I’d been trying to take care of his feelings all year, and it was the only time I’d ever asked anything of him in return.

And the same thing happened with my mother. When I went through my own crisis after the move to California and could no longer be the perfect child she needed me to be, she became abusive.

When you’ve never been loved for your true self, Miller says, you have no feeling of being loved at all.