THE DRAMA OF BEING A CHILD by Alice Miller
This is one of those reads that truly matter, especially in this day and age when only ignorance can still account for parents scaring their children.
It helps to understand that every individual has an ethical responsibility to look deep within and become more conscious of how his past is affecting his relationship with himself and others.
Alice Miller’s work is impactful and impossible to ignore, it speaks to you directly and compassionately - I can’t recommend it enough.
Here are a couple of key points that all humans should understand and apply in order to prevent further abuse, consciously or unconsciously, from happening:
Any child has a primary need to be regarded, trusted, loved and respected as the person they are. In an environment of respect and tolerance for the child’s feelings, the later phase of separation from the parents will normally happen through autonomy and confidence. However, in order for all this to happen, the parents must have grown up in such an atmosphere themselves.
If parents did not experience this balanced environment as children, they are themselves deprived and will continue to look for what their own parents could not give them at the appropriate time. These repressed, unconscious and unfulfilled needs will need some substitute gratification target and unfortunately that is very often a parent’s own children.
The small child is completely dependent on the parent so he will do all that he can to avoid losing the paternal figure.
In other words, if a mother/person closest to the child, who at the core is emotionally insecure and her well-being and equilibrium depend on her child’s behaving in a certain way, the child will respond intuitively and take on the role that has been assigned to him as a measure of existential security. That in essence is parent exploitation, the child’s existence should not be for parents to mirror their trauma onto them.
Later on, as adults, repressed anger, frustration, rage and sadness leads to depression, identification with positions of superiority, both in personal and professional life, to mask the suffering, feelings of weakness with intellectuality.
The book is full of such eye-opening examples but most importantly, it shows how tragedy can be prevented, what methods we have at our disposal for dealing with the consequences of child trauma.
“The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.”
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“Child abuse is still sanctioned — indeed, held in high regard — in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents.”
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“Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.”