the gifted child part three

quotes from the gifted child by alice miller

chapter 3: the vicious circle of contempt

"what child has never been laughed at for their fears and been told, 'you don't need to be afraid of a thing like that'? what child will then not feel shamed and despised because they could not assess the danger correctly? and will that little person not take the next opportunity to pass these feelings on to a still smaller child? such experiences come in all shades and varieties. common to them all is the sense of strength it gives the adult, who cannot control their own fears, to face the weak and helpless child's fear and be able to control fear in another person."

"for the person who, as a child, had to hide her true feelings from herself and others, this first step into the open produces much anxiety, yet she feels a great need to throw over her former restraints. the first experiences do not always lead to freedom but quite often lead instead to repetition of the person's childhood situation, in which she will experience feelings of agonizing shame and painful nakedness as an accompaniment to her genuine expressions of her true self. with the infallibility of a sleepwalker, she will seek out those who, like her parents (though for different reasons), certainly cannot understand her. because of her blindness caused by repression, she will try to make herself understandable to precisely these people - trying to make possible what cannot be."

"during her therapy, linda, forty-two, fell in love with an older, intelligent, and sensitive man, who nevertheless had to ward off and reject everything - except for eroticism - he could not understand intellectually, including psychotherapy. yet he was the one to whom she wrote long letters trying to explain the path she had taken in her therapy up to this point. she succeeded in overlooking all signals of his incomprehension and increased her efforts even more, until at last she was forced to recognize that she had again found a father substitute and that this was the reason she had been unable to give up her hopes of at last being understood. this awakening brought her agonizingly sharp feelings of shame, which lasted for a long time.

one day she was able to feel this shame deeply in the session and said: 'i feel so ridiculous, as if i've been talking to a wall and expecting it to answer, like a silly child.' i asked: 'would you think it ridiculous if you saw a child who had to tell their troubles to a wall because there was no one else available?' the despairing sobbing that followed my question gave linda access to a part of her former reality that was pervaded by boundless loneliness. it also eventually freed her from her agonizing, self-destructive, repetitive feelings of shame.

only much later could linda dare to connect this experience of 'a wall' with her own childhood history. for a time this woman, who was normally capable of expressing herself so clearly, described everything in such an extraordinarily complicated way and at such a precipitate speed that i couldn't fully understand it. she went through moments of sudden hate and rage, reproaching me for indifference and lack of understanding. linda could hardly recognize me anymore, although i had not changed. in her estranged feelings she now discovered the estrangement of her mother, who had spent the first year of her life in an orphanage and could not give her daughter any tenderness or closeness. linda had known that for a long time, but it was only intellectual knowledge. moreover, compassion for her mother's sad life history had hindered linda from feeling her own plight, the image of the poor mother had blocked her feelings.

it was not until she could make her reproaches, first toward me and then toward her mother, that the core of her despair became conscious: her lifelong search for closeness and contact that had never been met in infancy and had become repressed. repressed memories of the shy, distant, absent mother produced in the daughter the feeling of a wall, one that later separated her from other people in such a painful way. she was finally released from a compulsion to repeat that had consisted of constantly seeking a partner who had no understanding of her and then allowing herself to settle into an arrangement where she would feel helplessly dependent on him."

"an infant must learn that there are things about them for which the mother has 'no use.' she will expect her child to control their bodily functions as early as possible. on the conscious level the parents apparently want the infant to do so in order not to offend against society, but unconsciously they are protecting their own repression dating from the time when they were themselves small children afraid of 'offending'."

"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 the parents' needs. no argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest period, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy. they can be resolved only slowly, with the help of a revealing therapy.

probably the greatest of wounds - not to have been loved just as one truly was - cannot heal without the work of mourning. it can be either more or less successfully resisted and covered up (as in grandiosity and depression), or constantly torn open again in the compulsion to repeat. we encounter this latter possibility in obsessive behavior and in perversion, where the mother's (or father's) scornful reactions to the child's behavior have stayed with them as repressed memory, stored up in their body."

"as the child grows up, they cannot cease living their own truth and expressing it somewhere, perhaps in complete secrecy. in this way a person can have adapted completely to the demands of their surroundings and can have developed a false self, but in their perversion of their obsessions they still allow a portion of their true self to survive - in torment. and so the true self lives on, but underground, in the same conditions as the child once did with their disgusted mother, whose memory in the meantime they have repressed."

"what is unconscious cannot be abolished by proclamation or prohibition. one can, however, develop sensitivity toward recognizing it and begin to experience it consciously, and thus eventually gain control over it. a mother cannot truly respect her child as long as she does not realize what deep shame she causes them with an ironic remark, intended only to cover her own uncertainty. indeed, she cannot be aware of how deeply humiliated, despised, and devalued her child feels, if she herself has never consciously suffered these feelings, and if she tries to fend them off with irony."

"every child forms his first image of what is 'bad' quite concretely, by what is forbidden - by their parents' prohibitions, taboos, and fears. the child will have a long way to go before they can free themselves what what they have believed to be 'badness' in themselves. they will then no longer regard it as 'depraved' and 'wicked,' but as a comprehensible latent reaction to injuries they had to repress when a child. as an adult, they can discover the causes and free themselves from this unconscious reaction. they also have the opportunity to apologize for what they have done to others out of ignorance, blindness, and confusion, and doing so will help them to avoid repetitions of acts they no longer wish to continue."

"often a child's very gifts (their great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness - and their ability to be critical) will confront their parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. these regulations must then be rescued at the cost of the child's development. all this can lead to an apparently paradoxical situation when parents who are proud of their gifted child and who even admire them are forced by their own suppression to reject, suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in that child."

"to put it another way: many people suffering from severe symptoms are very intelligent. they read in newspapers and books about the absurdity of the arms race, about exploitation through capitalism, diplomatic insincerity, the arrogance and manipulation of power, submission of the weak, and the impotence of individuals - and they have given thought to these subjects. what they do not see, because they cannot see them, are the absurdities enacted by their own mothers when they were still tiny children."

"political action can be fed by the unconscious rage of children who have been misused, imprisoned, exploited, cramped, and drilled. this rage can be partially discharged in fighting 'enemies,' without having to give up the idealization of one's own parents."

"therapeutic effects (in the form of temporary improvement) may be achieved if a strict conscience can be replaced by the therapist's or the group's more tolerant one. the aim of therapy, however, is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront their own history and to grieve over it. the patient has to discover early memories within themselves and must become consciously aware of their parents' unconscious manipulation and contempt, so that they can free themselves from this."

"the contempt shown by many disturbed people may have various forerunners in their life history, but the function all expressions of contempt have in common is the defense against unwanted feelings. contempt simply evaporates, having lost its point, when it is no longer useful as a shield - against the child's shame over their desperate, unreturned love; against their feeling of inadequacy; or above all against their rage that their parents were not available. once we are able to feel and understand the repressed emotions of childhood, we will no longer need contempt as a defense against them. on the other hand, as long as we despise the other person and over-value our own achievements ('he can't do what i can do'), we do not have to mourn the fact that love is not forthcoming without achievement. nevertheless, if we avoid this mourning it means that we remain at bottom the one who is despised, for we have to despise everything in ourselves that is not wonderful, good, and clever. thus we perpetuate the loneliness of childhood: we despise weakness, helplessness, uncertainty - in short, the child in ourselves and in others."

"contempt as a rule will cease with the beginning of mourning for the irreversible that cannot be changed, for contempt, too, has in its own way served to deny the reality of the past. it is, after all, less painful to think that the others do not understand because they are too stupid. then one can make efforts to explain things to them, and the illusion of being understood ('if only i can express myself properly') can be maintained."

"then there are the people who can seem very friendly, if a shade patronizing, but in whose presence one feels as if one were nothing. they convey the feeling that they are the only ones who exist, the only one who have anything interesting or relevant to say. the others can only stand there and admire them in fascination, or turn away in disappointment and sorrow about their own lack of worth, unable to express themselves in these persons' presence. these people might be the children of grandiose parents, whom they as children had no hope of emulating; but later, as adults, they unconsciously pass on this atmosphere to those around them.

quite a different impression will be given by those people who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but who also therefore had to solve their own problems alone. these people, who give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. in their presence one feels one can't be recognized as a person with problems - just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom they always had to be strong.

keeping those examples in mind, it is easy to see why some professors or writers who are quite capable of expressing themselves clearly will use language that is so convoluted and arcane that their students of readers must struggle angrily to acquire ideas that they then can make little use of. the students may well experience feelings similar to those their teacher was once forced to suppress in relation to his parents. if the students themselves become teachers one day, they will then have the opportunity to hand on this unusable knowledge like a priceless jewel (because it has cost them so much).

it greatly aids the success of therapeutic work when we become aware of our parents' destructive patterns at work within us. but to free ourselves from these patterns we need more than an intellectual awareness: we need an emotional confrontation with our parents in an inner dialogue."

"consciously experiencing our legitimate emotions is liberating, not just because of the discharge of long-held tensions in the body but above all because it opens our eyes to reality (both past and present) and frees us of lies and illusions. it gives us back repressed memories and helps dispel attendant symptoms. it is therefore empowering without being destructive. repressed emotion can be resolved as soon as it is felt, understood, and recognized as legitimate. being detached from it becomes possible and this is totally different from repression."

"a person who can honestly and without self-deception deal with their feelings has no need to disguise them with the help of ideologies. . . individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common 'enemy' on whom to act out their repressed rage."