The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

This is a great book that helps you delve into the root causes of current pain. It’s uncomfortable work and the author doesn’t sugarcoat it. But it’s very rewarding if you let yourself go on the scary journey of healing, which does require you to sit with darker facets of yourself and your past.The people who wrote complaining reviews are missing the point — in order to heal, you have to embrace the hurt first. Then, like a snake, you metaphorically shed that skin.Also, the people dissing this book are all very in denial and their reviews seem to come from rigid “black and white” thinking. No one had perfect parents. This isn’t about demonizing your parents but rather recovering from their shortcomings. This about taking responsibility for your own healing. But some people would rather stay in their discomfort and misery than face the music — I suppose they figure the devil they know is better than the devil they don’t.

I started working with a great psychologist/therapist last year to deal with a few issues that i had diagnosed in myself and also to deal with PTSD. In one of our sessions, much to my surprise, he linked these issues back to my childhood and my parents and especially my mother. Apparently my mother has highly narcissistic tendencies and my father, with his indifference, has played the role of the enabler. As i started to do more research and read more to understand so many complicated issues that are part of the human psyche, i came across this book. Please allow me to very honest and say that to this day i have not finished reading the whole book. This, not because it is a difficult or poorly written book. On the contrary, it is brilliant, eloquent, and provides enough examples to make the topic easily understood by everyone. I have not finished it because sometimes the truth hurts and it hurts deeply when one faces it's ugly part. It is forces you to look inside your own self, to analyze your thoughts and actions, and more than anything to accept the origin of your fears and insecurities. Read it and re-read it over and over again, because by understanding your past you can change the present and the future and even if you may not fully break free of the pain, at least you will not repeat the same mistakes with your children. I can not recommend this book enough, painful as it is to read it and face truths about one's self. You will become a better person in the end.

I know those that love this book will just say I'm in denial. Fine.For everyone else, I'll save you the time. There is a monocausal root of sexual fantasies, Nazis, depression, criminality, loneliness, booger eating, bed wetting and bad hair days - it's your mom. As long as the dad doesn't beat his kids, he's fine. Mothers on the other hand, if this book is right, have a lot to answer for.If you don't believe me, look up "mother" in the Appendix and you'll find 18 references, many of them several pages long. Guess how many are under "father." That's a trick question because that word doesn't even rate one reference.If you want to blame your overachieving, rapacious, narcissistic, prejudice actions on your mom, happy reading. If you think that's silly, grab something else.Oh, and this book is not a book for helping you raise kids (as the title implies); it's about overcoming your "happy" childhood which wasn't really that happy when you think about it.

I am giving this book 5 stars because I think it is a must-read. After reading it 3 times over a number of years, I can honestly say it has been life-changing, the key to so many unanswered questions and neuroses. However, I must say that I like the original edition better. Even though it was full of Freudian psychological terminology, and it challenged me intellectually to read it, the process of looking up and familiarizing myself with the terms made me feel like I had unearthed a rare jewel, so much did it expand my knowledge and insight. Plus, the fact that it was addressed to the Psychology Professional was to me one of the most incredible things about the book. I have been to some truly insensitive counselors but this book put them on notice: Don't keep the patient locked in the same bad habits. Miller illustrates this with a powerful analogy about giving someone a meal at just the moment when they have the opportunity to escape a lifetime of incarceration---chilling! This new edition is a little preachy and gets down on religious people a little bit. I realize that there is nothing "religious" about psychology, but I felt that the original edition was, more than any other book I have ever read, completely un-self-concious, and to borrow the phrase from the Washington Post review of M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled, a "spontaneous act of generosity" and a rare gift.

This book has destroyed what was a loving parent/child relationship. The damage this author does is incalculable.The worst Freudian psychobabble.No solutions, just the absolute destruction of relationships.Not surprised to find out the author abandoned her own children to others to raise.The whole book seems bent on destroying relationships and to get people in to the psychiatrists office permanently, so the psychiatrist can be the patients "new, loving, supportive parent."Utterly horrifying.

A map to health and healing childhood wounding from our sick society that teaches it is normal to break a child's spirit, and the school system that institutionalizes this abuse, and the idea that grows out of it, workers are slaves of owners, and corporate greed that destroys spirit and the earth.

This valuable, short work is a passionate polemic about the damage which parents can do to their children and the healing, or harm, which psychotherapists can facilitate in their patients.From the first sentence, we are thrown into Miller’s battleground:‘Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.’This sums up all the characteristics of the book: urgent, succinct, insightful (‘the emotional discovery’ etc), melodramatic (‘one enduring weapon’) and slightly unbalanced (the absence of positives about good parenting).But her key point is surely true: ‘consciously experiencing our legitimate emotions is liberating’, both for our minds and for our bodies.Miller is very readable, giving lots of useful bullet point summaries and plenty of short, pertinent case histories to bring her teachings alive. When the first edition was published in 1987, the world had yet to wake up to the widespread prevalence of child sexual abuse, though this is in fact not the main concern of this book, which reaches back further, to the first few days and months of mother-child interaction as the primary determinant of a person’s predisposition for happiness or otherwise.It is the almost 100% focus on the negatives of parenting which I find off-putting. As Miller typically puts it in an early chapter, ‘there is the theoretical possibility that a sensitive child could have had parents who did not need to misuse him…’ The implication is that this ‘theoretical possibility’ is extremely rare. The author also writes, with the radical’s demand to be heard, that ‘child abuse is still sanctioned – indeed held in high regard – in our society as long as it is defined as child rearing.’ This is certainly provocative, and has merit, but it needs unpacking. Likewise, the absence of even the barest mention of other possible major influences in a person's life - such as siblings, non-parental traumas, positive models etc - raises questions of balance. Elsewhere, Miller exposes the narrow bandwidth of her searchlight, when she speaks about the necessity of being ‘capable of hating what is hateful’ – not that I object to this in principle, but that she tends towards an almost Manichean need to divide the world into evil and good selves, rather than seeing the energy and relationship between all things, and the need ultimately to accept (which does NOT mean passive adherence to) essential things as they are.Be that as it may, Miller has very important things to say about early childhood and the practise of psychotherapy. The secondary theme of the book, as indicated, is how psychotherapists can damage their clients if they have not themselves been through a truly deep and effective journey of emotional discovery about their own early childhood and the suppressed (ie conscious) or repressed (ie unconscious) emotions which may still be controlling them, to a greater or lesser degree.But it is parents who are Miller’s primary ‘target’ – the use of the latter term indicates something of the repressed anger and even rage which I feel underlies the power of Miller’s writing.Parents, and especially the mother, can do untold harm to their child in the very early weeks and months if they are unaware of their own ancient, childhood-embedded, feelings of rejection, contempt, horror, despair and/or helpless rage. All too often, Miller tell us, the child learns to adapt to the needs of the parent by projecting and feeling an ‘illusion of love’, creating a mask for him or herself, so as to maintain and attract the parent’s (conditional) love – thereby dissociating from genuinely experiencing his or her own feelings (which can lead to mental health issues later).Every human has a different case history, so there is no simple way forward - except to listen, carefully and with expert support, to oneself. Miller touches on many issues. For example, one problem which may arise in the adult as a result of poor parental love is ‘disregard for those who are smaller and weaker’, which is ‘a defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness’. Another may be that people ‘who as children successfully repressed their intense feelings often try to regain – at least for a short time – their lost intensity of experience with the help of drugs or alcohol’. Miller suggests that addiction of all kinds - as well as perpetuation of contempt, perversion and obsessive behaviour - is due above all to the deleterious effects of a negative early childhood.The author typically emphasises that if ‘we start from the premise that a person’s whole development (and his balance, which is based upon it) is dependent on the way his mother experienced his expression of his needs and sensations during his first days and weeks of life, then we must assume that it is here that the beginning of a later tragedy might be set.’ This is a dramatically totalising expression of what drives damaged human beings - which includes most of us, according to Miller. There is hope, however, because we can become aware, mourn and heal.These highly personal harms, if common in a society, can drive unhealthy political and religious conditions, and thus, Miller says, it is vital that we understand ourselves in order to encourage benign political and social trends: ‘What makes us sick are those things we cannot see through, society’s constraints that we have absorbed through our parents’ eyes.’This is all good, strong stuff – but it is embedded in a highly Western emphasis on the person as an autonomous individual, more or less separate from a community of other people (except the mother in the first year), from nature, from any possibility of a benign creator, and from culturally and genetically inherited characteristics. In her search for what makes a ‘whole’ person, in the biggest possible sense of the term, I think that Miller is right to emphasise that the key relationship is the bond formed with the mother (or primary carer) in early childhood, but she misses the broader social and cultural conditioning. Perhaps more significantly, Miller allows no sense of the different ways in which children with exactly the same early parental environment may respond; in other words, though not ‘at fault’, the child surely has some degree of agency, no matter how small, because, if not, then there would be no possibility later of discovering this true infant ‘self’ and thus being able to ‘mourn’ and move on from early learnt or imposed patterns of behaviour.Nevertheless, what we humans need as infants, Miller tells us in a rare positive paragraph, is a ‘healthy self-feeling’, meaning ‘the unquestioned certainty that the feelings and needs one experiences are part of one’s self’. Much of the depression which ravages perhaps one quarter of mankind stems from poor self-esteem, arising (Miller says) from essentially fake or not fully realised love from a parent, who may have sought (unconsciously) to satisfy their own needs rather than those of the baby for whom they care.Miller emphasises time and again the necessity of a patient being helped by a psychotherapist to recognise their early trauma arising from weak bonding or distorted emotional nurturing. Only when the patient has made this discovery for themselves, deep in their unconscious, can they then embark on the painful process of mourning for the lost childhood happiness - which can never be recovered, though it can be repaired in the adult. We can become free of the patterns of our parents’ behaviour ‘only when we can fully feel and acknowledge the suffering they inflicted on us’.Thus therapy can help the patient to find profound orientation to their true self – as long as the therapist takes all of the patient’s feelings seriously. Answers or detailed diagnoses should not be given by the therapist to the patient, who must discover her/his own past. This encourages the patient’s ability to trust her/himself – ‘empowerment’, to use a currently fashionable term. This may involve the patient - Miller dislikes the term ‘client’ – learning to resist the demands of his/her parents. Even though the parents may be dead, deep memories and/or patterns of behaviour need to be brought to the surface so that they can be transcended by being brought to light: ‘the truth shall set you free’.As Miller wrote (she died in 2010): ‘This ability to grieve – that is, give up the illusion of [the patient’s] ‘happy’ childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt he has endured – can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence of his Sisyphean task’ [ie always striving for success].Unsurprisingly, given Miller’s ‘wake-up call' approach, no broader context nor any statistical evidence for her argument is given. Thus there is nothing in the book about therapy methods, nor any acknowledgement of the highly pertinent attachment theories of John Bowlby and his successors (from the 1950s onwards), to which Miller must be indebted. No doubt she wanted to avoid academic jargon, but in the 16 ‘Works Cited’ she does not mention even one book by an attachment theorist (and they were all practising psychotherapists as well as writers) - though six other books by Alice Miller herself are included. I see this is a sign of the muted egotism which I came across in other forms in the book: Miller's universe is her own experience, her theories, her patients, and a few well-known artistic icons such as Herman Hesse. However, this does not invalidate her central insight.

When reading this book, Miller writes in a very moralistic authoritative tone which makes you believe any failings to address your childhood issues are very much your own. Yet when you look at it, there is very little good advice or any real actionable insights.It's only when coming back to review I realise that firstly I'm not alone but secondly there is also a book written by her son detailing how she failed to action her own weak advice and ended up passing on her own unresolved trauma to him.I think there are interesting ideas in there and she comes close to some really important discoveries, however, her own lack of self awareness and grandiosity prevented that realisation.

The single most amazing book I've ever read.I bought this book after about 15 therapy sessions. For me, I think it helped to have done some therapy first in order to fully appreciate this book. There's a certain language, and tone, and style which may be off putting to some people if they pick it up "cold".I've explored lots of other "self help" books. After a while, I started to realise that most of them are very superficial and give the illusion of helping, but the benefit is short lived, there is no lasting benefit. Much of what is written online is also superficial and ultimately unhelpful.If you struggle with low self esteem, depression, anxiety or similar, then I recommend this book. It may be the only book you need. Read it to complement your own therapy - I don't think it is a substitute.

The book is good if you are studying psychology. It’s eye opening on how cruel some parents are to their children without realizing the impact of their behavior on the child. I’ve learnt that children cannot be separated from mummy on the first weeks after birth as this might have significant impact on the child’s development. The book might be useful for parents who can recognize that even subconsciously they are passing their life/childhood experiences to their children. E.g.a mum can subconsciously project her needs on a child.

I devoured this book in a few days. An easy read, but powerful and profound. I feel excited by this book and making sense of where, when and how we can loose our sense of self. Miller has summed up the impact of parenting during the early years of childhood and how we can unconsciously damage and manipulate our children from our own unresolved childhood pain. Miller uses many examples to show perspectives from child eyes and illustrate the vicious circle of contempt. I will more than likely dip back into this book as so many points to review and reconsider. A truly enlightening read.