Alice Miller Short Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.

Alice Miller
Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.

Alice Miller
Problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience.

Alice Miller
Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing.

Alice Miller
The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.

Alice Miller
Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.

Alice Miller
Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.

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

Alice Miller
Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.

Alice Miller
The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.

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

Alice Miller
All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection

Alice Miller
If a mother respects both herself and her child from his very first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others.

Alice Miller
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.

Alice Miller
That probably greatest of narcissistic wounds — not to have been loved just as one truly was — cannot heal without the work of mourning.

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.

Alice Miller
Hard as it is to believe, in the entire world there is not a single faculty in which a degree is offered in the study of psychic injuries in childhood.

Alice Miller
The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child's eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did.

Alice Miller
The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center — the central actor — in his own activity.

Alice Miller
The commandment to refrain from placing blame on our parents, deeply imprinted in us by our upbringing, skillfully performs the function of hiding essential truths from us.

Alice Miller
We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.

Alice Miller
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.

Alice Miller