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Alice Miller

Alice Miller Quotes

Psychologist

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Famous Alice Miller Quotes

“It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.”

PeopleNeedsFeelsShouldBelievePersonsDoeFactsStrongDifficultSimpleChildhoodVictimObviousHumiliate
Book:For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
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“The art of not experiencing feelings. A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.”

IfsFeelsChildrenPersonsArtFeelingsMotherOrderEmotionAcceptingSupportRiskMissingLosingSubstitutesMother's Love
Book:The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
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“In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.”

FeelsMayChildrenLongFactsHelpingHandsPainTermResultsViolenceProduceDevelopmentDrugResearchAngerSuicideAddictionRagePunishmentCrueltyWitnessObedienceLong TermEnlightenedBullyingInabilityShort TermDrug AddictionDrug AddictCorporal Punishment
Author:Alice Miller
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“People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be-both in their youth and in adulthood-intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience.”

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Author:Alice Miller
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“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 cannot be recognized as a person with problems just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom he always had to be strong.”

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Book:The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition
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