The Drama of Being a Child : The Search for the True Self

It's rather sad to think about how much literature and psychological research has gone into arguing the case against abusing children, and how little an effect it has had. Nevertheless, this book is one more useful arrow to keep in the quiver to argue against the "spartan upbringing toughens them up" brigade.

Miller offers through her book a fascinating tale of the effects of childhood, not solely on the child as these events take place, but more so on the adult. These events from childhood that have become the invisible strings that guide us through our lives are, more often than not, simply accepted by the adult person as a fact that had little to no consequences on their lives. It is only when as an adult we can look back to our childhood days and not only understand but truly feel what affected us as children, that we can begin to unravel the tangle of fears, habits, and issues that has followed us everywhere we went during our adult life.Much like emotional therapeutic counselling, Miller recognises the importance of the hurt and lonely child we all carry within us. She emphasises that it is that child’s emotions that make us often react as we do to the world around our adult selves. Because that child is made of so many repressed emotions, so he seeks to either take revenge upon the world, or hide away everything even more. The dialogue with this Inner Child is, to Miller, as intrinsic a part of healing, as it is for emotional therapeutic counselling.Miller also mentions the importance of confronting those who have caused the hurt during childhood, whether face to face or, if the former is impossible for one reason or another, through a mental dialogue wherein the adult can finally unload the Inner Child’s actual feelings onto the person who has caused them and have a discussion with them. Similarly to emotional therapeutic counselling, Miller does not believe that we can be free of the hurt of our childhood until we have truly felt the emotions that our child-self repressed.Another element in the book that reminded me strongly of what we had done in the course was Miller’s regular mention of her patients’ dreams and their importance in their therapy. She takes dreams as the subconscious’ way of talking to us, or trying to point where or what the issues might be. She points out in one of her examples how it can be an easy way to track therapy progress as the patient’s dreams change and evolve.I personally found this read enlightening, especially following what I had already learnt about myself during the course and it shed a fascinating light on some elements of my childhood that has just seemed that they had left me unaffected up to that point. Stories of which I have little to no recollection but have been told about seemed to come back with stark clarity as the emotions I had felt were accessed. It emphasised that it was ok for my adult self to revisit those emotions, to let them happen and face the feelings of my childhood without fear of any consequences. It has allowed me to understand my reactions to certain things that happen around me, as well as turn the emotions elicited towards their true target instead of the situation at hand.

...then Alice Miller gently sits with you as she describes the drama of YOUR childhood. Miller has a writing style, akin to a wise Aunt / Nan, which guides and explains through dramas which you may have experienced. I suggest you don't try and read this in one sitting, my typical approach, page by page and stop when the tears are flowing as your inner child releases pain. Every single one of us has had our own childhood and no one book can cover each unique circumstantial drama. Whether you are a mother, a therapist or client in therapy and your childhood seemed very different to others, I highly recommend this book for you as an adult. Let your inner child understand, allow your adult self to learn to love, heal and blaze your own independent life. I am very glad I bought this book.

This valuable, short work is a passionate polemic about the damage which parents can do to their children and the healing, or harm, which psychotherapists can facilitate in their patients.From the first sentence, we are thrown into Miller’s battleground:‘Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.’This sums up the characteristics of the book: urgent, succinct, insightful (‘the emotional discovery’ etc), melodramatic (‘one enduring weapon’) and slightly unbalanced (the absence of positives about good parenting).But her key point is surely true: ‘consciously experiencing our legitimate emotions is liberating’, both for our minds and for our bodies.Miller is very readable, giving lots of useful bullet point summaries and plenty of short, pertinent case histories to bring her teachings alive. When the first edition was published in 1987, the world had yet to wake up to the widespread prevalence of child sexual abuse, though this is in fact not the main concern of this book, which reaches back further, to the first few days and months of mother-child interaction as the primary determinant of a person’s predisposition for happiness or otherwise.It is the almost 100% focus on the negatives of parenting which I find off-putting. As Miller typically puts it in an early chapter, ‘there is the theoretical possibility that a sensitive child could have had parents who did not need to misuse him…’ The implication is that this ‘theoretical possibility’ is extremely rare. The author also writes, with the radical’s demand to be heard, that ‘child abuse is still sanctioned – indeed held in high regard – in our society as long as it is defined as child rearing.’ This is certainly provocative, and has merit, but it needs unpacking. Likewise, the absence of even the barest mention of other possible major influences in a person's life - such as siblings, non-parental traumas, positive models etc - raises questions of balance. Elsewhere, Miller exposes the narrow bandwidth of her searchlight, when she speaks about the necessity of being ‘capable of hating what is hateful’ – not that I object to this in principle, but that she tends towards a Manichean division of the world into evil and good selves, rather than seeing the energy and relationship between all things. Little attention is paid to the healing necessity, ultimately, of taking responsibility for our own lives.Be that as it may, Miller has very important things to say about early childhood and the practise of psychotherapy. The secondary theme of the book, as indicated, is how psychotherapists can damage their clients if they have not themselves been through a truly deep and effective journey of emotional discovery about their own early childhood and the suppressed (ie conscious) or repressed (ie unconscious) emotions which may still be controlling them, to a greater or lesser degree.But it is parents who are Miller’s primary ‘target’ – the use of the latter term indicates something of the repressed anger and even rage which I feel underlies the power of Miller’s writing.Parents, and especially the mother, can do untold harm to their child in the very early weeks and months if they are unaware of their own ancient, childhood-embedded, feelings of rejection, contempt, horror, despair and/or helpless rage. All too often, Miller tell us, the child learns to adapt to the needs of the parent by projecting and feeling an ‘illusion of love’, creating a mask for him or herself, so as to maintain and attract the parent’s (conditional) love – thereby dissociating from genuinely experiencing his or her own feelings (which can lead to mental health issues later).Every human has a different life-story, so there is no simple way forward - except to listen, carefully and with expert support, to oneself. Miller touches on many issues. For example, one problem which may arise in the adult as a result of poor parental love is ‘disregard for those who are smaller and weaker’, which is ‘a defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness’. Another may be that people ‘who as children successfully repressed their intense feelings often try to regain – at least for a short time – their lost intensity of experience with the help of drugs or alcohol’. Miller suggests that addiction of all kinds - as well as perpetuation of contempt, perversion and obsessive behaviour - is due above all to the deleterious effects of a negative early childhood.The author typically emphasises that if ‘we start from the premise that a person’s whole development (and his balance, which is based upon it) is dependent on the way his mother experienced his expression of his needs and sensations during his first days and weeks of life, then we must assume that it is here that the beginning of a later tragedy might be set.’ This is a dramatically totalising expression of what drives damaged human beings - which includes most of us, according to Miller. There is hope, however, because we can become aware, mourn and heal.These highly personal harms, if common in a society, can drive unhealthy political and religious conditions, and thus, Miller says, it is vital that we understand ourselves in order to encourage benign political and social trends: ‘What makes us sick are those things we cannot see through, society’s constraints that we have absorbed through our parents’ eyes.’This is all good, strong stuff – but it is embedded in a highly Western emphasis on the person as an autonomous individual, more or less separate from a community of other people (except the mother in the first year), from nature, from any possibility of a benign creator, and from culturally and genetically inherited characteristics. In her search for what makes a ‘whole’ person, in the biggest possible sense of the term, I think that Miller is right to emphasise that the key relationship is the bond formed with the mother (or primary carer) in early childhood, but she misses the broader social and cultural conditioning. Perhaps more significantly, Miller allows no sense of the different ways in which children with exactly the same early parental environment may respond; in other words, though not ‘at fault’, the child surely has some degree of agency, no matter how small, because, if not, then there would be no possibility later of discovering this true infant ‘self’ and thus being able to ‘mourn’ and move on from early learnt or imposed patterns of behaviour.Nevertheless, what we humans need as infants, Miller tells us in a rare positive paragraph, is a ‘healthy self-feeling’, meaning ‘the unquestioned certainty that the feelings and needs one experiences are part of one’s self’. Much of the depression which ravages perhaps one quarter of mankind stems from poor self-esteem, arising (Miller says) from essentially fake or not fully realised love from a parent, who may have sought (unconsciously) to satisfy their own needs rather than those of the baby for whom they care.Miller emphasises time and again the necessity of a patient being helped by a psychotherapist to recognise their early trauma arising from weak bonding or distorted emotional nurturing. Only when the patient has made this discovery for themselves, deep in their unconscious, can they then embark on the painful process of mourning for the lost childhood happiness - which can never be recovered, though it can be repaired in the adult. We can become free of the patterns of our parents’ behaviour ‘only when we can fully feel and acknowledge the suffering they inflicted on us’.Thus, therapy can help the patient to find profound orientation to their true self – as long as the therapist takes all of the patient’s feelings seriously. Answers or detailed diagnoses should not be given by the therapist to the patient, who must discover her/his own past. This encourages the patient’s ability to trust her/himself – ‘empowerment’, to use a currently fashionable term. This may involve the patient - Miller dislikes the term ‘client’ – learning to resist the demands of his/her parents. Even though the parents may be dead, deep memories and/or patterns of behaviour need to be brought to the surface so that they can be transcended by being brought to light: ‘the truth shall set you free’.As Miller wrote (she died in 2010): ‘This ability to grieve – that is, give up the illusion of [the patient’s] ‘happy’ childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt he has endured – can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence of his Sisyphean task’ [ie always striving for success].Unsurprisingly, given Miller’s ‘wake-up call' approach, no broader context nor any statistical evidence for her argument is given. Thus there is nothing in the book about therapy methods, nor any acknowledgement of the highly pertinent attachment theories of John Bowlby and his successors (from the 1950s onwards), to which Miller must be indebted. No doubt she wanted to avoid academic jargon, but in the 16 ‘Works Cited’ she does not mention even one book by an attachment theorist - though six other books by Alice Miller herself are included. I see this as a sign of the muted egotism which I came across in other forms in the book: Miller's universe is her own experience, her theories, her patients, and a few well-known artistic icons such as Herman Hesse. However, this does not invalidate her central insight.

I devoured this book in a few days. An easy read, but powerful and profound. I feel excited by this book and making sense of where, when and how we can loose our sense of self. Miller has summed up the impact of parenting during the early years of childhood and how we can unconsciously damage and manipulate our children from our own unresolved childhood pain. Miller uses many examples to show perspectives from child eyes and illustrate the vicious circle of contempt. I will more than likely dip back into this book as so many points to review and reconsider. A truly enlightening read.