From Rage to Courage: Answers to Readers' Letters
Alice Miller
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0393337898
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Collected for the first time, Alice Miller’s most helpful, therapeutic, and invaluable answers to hundreds of readers’ letters.
The renowned childhood researcher, psychotherapist, and best-selling author Alice Miller has received, throughout her long and distinguished career, countless personal letters from readers all over the world. In From Rage to Courage, Dr. Miller has assembled the most recent, producing an insightful work that illuminates the issues and consequences of childhood abuse. Whether exploring the connection between repressed anger and physical illnesses like cancer, the reasons why many survivors of abuse turn to drugs or crime, or the cycle that condemns generations of families to cruelty in childhood, Dr. Miller’s answers are sensitive, honest, and supported by decades of experience. Unafraid of controversy, she discusses much-debated theories such as the impact of religious belief on the cultural traditions of child abuse and the therapeutic community’s denial of the truth and dependency on antidepressants. A practical guide to Dr. Miller’s unique therapeutic concept, this work once again affirms the healing and liberating power of retrieved emotions.
Secret Paths: Women in the New Midlife
Stories We've Heard, Stories We've Told: Life-Changing Narratives in Therapy and Everyday Life
Bullies Are a Pain in the Brain (Laugh & Learn)
Men in Therapy: New Approaches for Effective Treatment
Deprivation and Delinquency (Routledge Classics)
were unable to question even the cruelest behavior of their parents. To me this was exactly the reason why they were blocked. I think that you don’t need to recall every traumatic event if you deeply feel the devastating effect that your mother’s or father’s hatred for you created in your soul. It is hubris, and it doesn’t make much sense to forgive oneself. Of course, flashbacks may come again and again and will help you to understand your feelings (of the past and of today) once you are open to
you; I can’t repeat here what I have already written. It is not easy to blame the parents, not at all, because it scares us—we expect to be punished. Blaming oneself is easier. But the price we pay might be our illness, or that of our children. 26 Rage Your rage can become the door to your actual life. Try to feel it as strongly and clearly as possible, then, not before, try to understand its cause. Similar situations from the past will soon come to your mind. Now you can see and feel what the
that people can experience the rage they have withheld their whole lives and suppressed in their bodies, getting rid of their symptoms as they become aware of what has been done to them. This happens when they succeed in overcoming their fear of losing their parents’ “love” if they are true to themselves, if they are emotionally honest and show their legitimate rage or criticism. Most people don’t take this risk, remaining their whole life in fear of their childhood. If children are forbidden to
This discovery will help you to avoid much unnecessary suffering—futile attempts to love and to elicit love where this is impossible and self-destructive. I needed many more years to understand that. And as you see on my Web site, so many people try and try to succeed in respecting a law that is based on a lie. 28 Avoiding the Truth Open the “Flyers” page on my Web site and read the text “21 Points.” In my opinion, memories are always true, even if not exact, but the idea that traumas can be
begin to feel, it makes sense that the anger first comes in the way that the child learned it from his father. But with time the adult will learn his own way of showing his feelings. Meanwhile, he must accept that first he reacts like his father or his mother. Fortunately, he can observe it, so he sees more and more how he was suffering in his childhood. Not many people have the courage to admit that they are imitating their parents; they don’t want to be like them—ever. But acknowledging this
