Alice Miller Quotes About Feelings

Quotes about: Feelings

• 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.

  Alice Miller

  Mother, Art, Children

  Alice Miller (1997). “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self”, p.9, Basic Books

• Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.

  Alice Miller

  Children, People, Expectations

  Alice Miller (1997). “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self”, p.87, Basic Books

• All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection

  Alice Miller

  Children, Self, Feelings

  Alice Miller (1997). “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self”, p.130, Basic Books

• If we do not work on all three levels -- body, feeling, mind -- the symptoms of our distress will keep returning, as the body goes on repeating the story stored in its cells until it is finally listened to and understood.

  Alice Miller

  Cells, Feelings, Mind

• Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.

  Alice Miller

  Feelings, Body, Facts

• The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Confused, Childhood

• It is precisely because a child's feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.

  Alice Miller

  Strong, Children, Wall

  Alice Miller (2008). “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition”, p.33, Hachette UK

• The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.

  Alice Miller

  Depression, Pain, Opposites

  Alice Miller (1981). “The drama of the gifted child”, Basic Books (AZ)

• The free expression of resentment against one's parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one's true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and - with luck - reconciliation.

  Alice Miller

  Family, Opportunity, Self

• It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something that I could not have learned from any book.

  Alice Miller

  Beautiful, Lonely, Confused

• Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.

  Alice Miller

  Effort, Feelings, Reason

  Alice Miller (2006). “The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting”, p.20, W. W. Norton & Company

• Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.

  Alice Miller

  Warrior, Feelings, Defense

  Alice Miller (1997). “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self”, p.74, Basic Books

• Quite often I have been faced with people who were praised and admired for their talents and their achievements... According to prevailing attitudes, these people-the pride and joy of their parents-should have had a strong and stable sense of self-assurance. But the case is exactly the opposite... Whenever they suddenly get the feeling they have failed to live up to some ideal image or have not measured up to some standard, then they are plagued by anxiety or deep feelings of guilt and shame. What are the reasons for such disturbances in these competent, accomplished people?

  Alice Miller

  Strong, Attitude, Pride

• 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.

  Alice Miller

  Strong, Children, Mean

  Alice Miller (2008). “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition”, p.58, Hachette UK

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