For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
Alice Miller
Top 10 Best Quotes
“To escape this vicious cycle we must face the truth. And we can do it. We were humiliated children; we were the victims of our parents’ ignorance, the victims of their history, of the unconscious scars with which childhood left them. We had no choice but to deny the truth.”
“The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our life. And we often impose the most agonising suffering upon ourselves.”
“individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naïveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves”
“We admire people who oppose the regime in totalitarian country and think they have courage or a "strong moral sense" or have remained "true to their principles" and the like. We may also smile at their naïveté, thinking, "Don't they realise that their words are of no use at all against this oppressive power? That they will hath to pay dearly for their protest?”
“True emotional understanding has nothing to do with cheap sentimental pity.”
“Time after time, the amazing fact is uncovered that sons and daughters are unconsciously re-enacting their parents fate— all the more intensely the less precise their knowledge of it.”
“Those who persecute others are warding of knowledge of their own fate as victims.”
“Six years after I began to paint I wrote my first three books in three years (The Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware), in which I tried to explain the connections between denied suffering in childhood and adult violence.”
“Sense such humiliation, combined with prohibiting a child's verbal expression, is a constant and universally encountered factor in child-rearing, the influence of this factor in the child's later development is easily overlooked.”
“If the path to experiencing one's feelings is blocked either the prohibitions of "poisonous pedagogy" or by the needs of the parents, then these feelings will have to be lived out. This can occur either in a destructive form, as in Hitler's case, or in a self-destructive one, as in Christiane F.'s. Or, as in the case of most criminals who end up in prison, this living out can lead to the destruction both of the self and of others.”
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Book Keywords:
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