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

Book by Alice Miller · 4 quotes · Childhood, Children, Feelings

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

“[The mutually dependent child] cannot rely on his own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of his own real needs, and is alienated from himself to the highest degree. Under these circumstances he cannot separate from his parents, and even as an adult he is still dependent on affirmation from his partner, from groups, and especially from his own children ... Unless the heir casts off his 'inheritance' by becoming fully conscious of his true past, and thus of his true nature, loneliness in the parental home will necessarily be followed by an adulthood lived in emotional isolation.”

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“Often a child's very gifts (his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness-and his ability to be critical) will confront his 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 of this can lead to an apparently paradoxical situation when parents are proud of their gifted child and who admire him are forced by their own repression to reject, suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in that child.”

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“This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?”

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“Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.”

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