Alice Miller Quotes about Childhood

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The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

Alice Miller

Children, Confused, Childhood

The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.

Alice Miller

Past, Childhood, Suffering

Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.19, Macmillan

I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.

Alice Miller

Childhood, Parent, Survival

Alice Miller (1998). “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child”, p.72, Macmillan

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.

Alice Miller

Children, Long, Childhood

Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.265, Macmillan

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

Alice Miller

Childhood, Wish, Trying

Alice Miller (1991). “Breaking down the wall of silence: the liberating experience of facing painful truth”, Penguin Press HC, The

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

Alice Miller

People, Childhood, Way

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

Alice Miller

School, Confusion, Childhood

Alice Miller (1991). “Breaking down the wall of silence: the liberating experience of facing painful truth”, Penguin Press HC, The