Alice Miller

What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.

There are people who have benefited from therapy without being confronted with the past at all.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.

Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.

Regression to the stage of early infancy is not a suitable method in and of itself. Such a regression can only be effective if it happens in the natural course of therapy and if the client is able to maintain adult consciousness at the same time.

Today I should not be identified with any kind of regressive therapy.

Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.

If its very painful for you to criticize your friends youre safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it thats the time to hold your tongue.

Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings those who are intimidated will be intimidating those who are humiliated will impose humiliation and those whose souls are murdered will murder.

An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.

Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.

The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves.

The results of any traumatic experience such as abuse can only be resolved by experiencing articulating and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.

Psychoanalysis does not distort the truth by accident. It does so by necessity. It is an effective system for the suppression of the truth about childhood, a truth feared by our entire society. Not surprisingly, it enjoys great esteem among intellectuals.

Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.

Nobody is born evil.

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against ones own despised and unwanted feelings.

It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.

It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion - something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.

We produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.

The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.