Alice Miller - The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self

P ROLOGUE :
T HOU S HALT N OT K NOW

Part I
CHILDHOOD: THE UNTAPPED SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE

Part II
HOW WE ARE STRUCK EMOTIONALLY BLIND

Part III
BREAKING THROUGH: DISCOVERING OUR CHILDHOOD HISTORIES

E PILOGUE :
F ROM I GNORANCE TO K NOWLEDGE AND C OMPASSION

I WROTE THIS book not for professionals but for readers who want to think about their lives and test new ideashence the absence of psychological jargon. Three terms that I have elaborated in my earlier work figure largely here, however, and they require a word of explanation for readers coming to my work for the first time.

Poisonous pedagogy is a phrase I use to refer to the kind of parenting and education aimed at breaking a child's will and making that child into an obedient subject by means of overt or covert coercion, manipulation, and emotional blackmail.

In my books For Your Own Good and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware , I have explained the concept using concrete examples. In my other books I have repeatedly stressed how the mendacious mentality behind this approach to dealing with children can leave long-lasting imprints on the way we think and relate to one another in our adult lives.

A helping witness is a person who stands by an abused child (consistently or occasionally), offering support and acting as a balance against the cruelty otherwise dominant in the child's everyday life. This can be anyone from the child's immediate world: a teacher, a neighbor, a caregiver, a grandmother, often a sibling.

Helping witnesses give sympathy and affection to these beaten or neglected children. They trust the children and help them feel that they are not bad or evil but worthy of kindness from others. Thanks to such witnesses, who may be completely oblivious to the role they are playing, children in difficult situations can see that there is such a thing as love in this world. In the best cases they learn how to develop trust in their fellow humans and to accept the love and kindness that come their way.

In the total absence of helping witnesses these children glorify the violence they have been subjected to and frequently make blatant use of it in later life. (It is no coincidence that as children, mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao had no helping witnesses to turn to.)

In adult life, a role similar to that of childhood's helping witness may be taken over by an enlightened witness . By this I mean someone who is aware of the consequences that neglect and cruelty in childhood can have. Enlightened witnesses support these harmed individuals, empathize with them, and help them gain an understanding of their feelings of anxiety and powerlessness as products of their own history rather than as some frightening, mysterious force. This knowledge makes it easier to appreciate the options open to them as adults.

Therapists can qualify as enlightened witnesses, as can well-informed and open-minded teachers, lawyers, counselors, and writers. I see myself as an author whose books are, among other things, designed to convey information that is still frequently considered taboo. My goal is also to help expertstherapists, counselors, educatorsunderstand their own lives better and thus become enlightened witnesses for their clients, patients, children, and, not least, for themselves. Sometimes I have been successful in this endeavor, as is shown by the following excerpt from a letter written to me by a European poet and singer:

Dear Alice Miller,

I am writing to you and sending the enclosed CD as a way of thanking you for the support and help you have given me for so many years. I have had my songs translated into German so that you can read them in your own language.

I remember very well that whenever the present consequences of my past were at their most tormenting, your books were my link with reality. The things I found out about my childhood from the lyrics of my own songs came as a shock. What they revealed was appalling. For a long time I closed my eyes to what I knew deep down and the consequences that were bound to follow if I accepted it. My whole body was crying out and I did not understand why. But with those words, carried by the music and intuitively slipping past the censor on guard within, I came close to what I was trying to tell myself. Slowly, experiences I never knew I had started unfolding before me. If at this sensitive stage I had not had the good fortune to encounter your books, telling me so clearly that I was not alone, I do not know how long I might have gone on suppressing what my inner self was trying to get through to me.

Finally the support from your books gave me the courage to seek help from a psychotherapist, and the sessions with him were the next stage in my labor of self-discovery. At last I was able to share my suppressed experiences with someone and gradually uncover what I had always felt I must hide from myself. Confronting the people who had exposed me to such interference with my self confirmed that my emotional memory had told me the truth. Then it was easier to find a remedy. But I was lucky all the same. With a bad therapist I would have been thrown off the track and lost a lot of time. The way back is long enough as it is, and shortcuts are often deceptive.

Without the information your books communicated to me I would not have been properly able to accept what I read in my sons' eyes about my self. With my lack of freedom and my early isolation, I would have stood in the way of their freedom even more than I did. I am happy to have found help and support in my attempt to find my way back to the path of my life. When numbing guilt from my past surfaces and tells me I have no right to live, I frequently reach for one of your books and read for a while. That gives me the courage to go on.

In The Drama of the Gifted Child I described the suffering of children forced to live in a world in which their feelings are ignored and denied. My stories helped many readers discover their own personal histories, which they had kept hidden from themselves. In my later books I demonstrated that this denial and repression of childhood suffering, and the blindness to it in later life that I identified in my clients, hold true for many others. In the works of major writers, philosophers, and artistsincluding Kafka, Flaubert, Beckett, Picasso, Soutine, van Gogh, and NietzscheI was able to show the traces their childhoods had left on them and was amazed at the similarities among their life stories. In the childhoods of the worst tyrants in history I discovered a recurring pattern: extreme cruelty, idealization of the parents, glorification of violence, denial of pain, and revenge wreaked on whole nations and peoples as a way of getting even for the cruelty they had once experienced and then denied.