The voice of Alice Miller, the world’s leading expert on child abuse, was almost never heard by her contemporaries. Her views were too radical. We share the key points about raising children that Miller outlined in her books.
Pay attention to what and in what voice you say to the child, because your voice will sound in his head all his life. Alice Miller had to go against most colleagues and society to defend a simple idea: adults should respect the child in the same way that they would like him to respect them.
1. A tyrant is a traumatized child who was beaten and humiliated by his parents. If a person has been allowed to feel free and strong since childhood, then later on he will not have the need to humiliate others.
2. Adults think that the living soul of a child is a danger to their power.
3. It is what parents hide that worries the child most of all.
4. Traumatized children remain forever attached to their parents and do not reach emotional maturity.
5. The human soul is practically indestructible, and its ability to be reborn from the ashes remains as long as the body breathes.
6. A person has the right to their own feelings and to express them.
7. For most people, the thought that their parents did not love them is simply unbearable. The more evidence of dislike, the more people cling to the illusion that they have been loved.
8. Most people find it easier to die (literally or symbolically, by killing their feelings) than to feel again all the helplessness they suffered as children.
9. The demand for good behavior has nothing to do with effective therapy or with life itself. For many people, these attitudes block the path to freedom.
10. The body uses depression as a way to protest our betrayal of ourselves.
11. Moralizing only leads children astray and blocks their path to self-knowledge. The body, after all, does not understand moral precepts.
12. Hypocrisy is a universal means of mastering human souls, including in pedagogy.
13. A liar cannot respect himself, and one who does not respect himself does not respect others.
14. The anger of a parent is a consequence of his own problems. But the adult lays the blame for them on the child.
15. Complete submission to the will of educators entails the readiness of an adult to completely submit to someone else’s political will.
16. Any education is harmful.
17. People trained to be silent suffer from it consciously or, more often, unconsciously.
18. The attitude of parents to the child affects the subsequent attitude of the child to himself.
19. The inability to feel one’s own suffering, endured in childhood, leads to the fact that a person may be immune to the suffering of others.
20. Bad behavior is one of the few ways a child uses to punish an adult.
21. When the inner child of an adult becomes free, a person will discover the origins of his life forces.