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

i wrote a note on the cover page which reads: "this is a very sad book. and very necessary to read BEFORE one has children. unfortunately too late for me :((". and this is how i felt (and still feel) after having read it (just finished it at 2 am this morning). the premise of the book is that what we are not aware of, rules (destroys) our lives. the trauma of being mistreated, manipulated, ridiculed or just ignored in the first days / years of our lives by adults we depended on for our existence gets stored in our bodies and it conditions us not only to neurosis, but also to taking it out on the first available weaker person -usually our children. it also claims that thanks to the way we are brought up and "loved" by our (own screwed up and wounded) caretakers conditionally, for what we do and how we behave and not for who we are (for the fact we exist), we tend to deny parts of ourselves that the caretakers wish to expunge. we mould ourselves according to what we think they want, and lose ourselves in the process. as adults, we keep carrying the feeling of inadeqacy and unworthiness and experience it as depression or grandiosity (in which no achievement really is enough for us to start valuing ourselves so we keep pushing for more, just to keep the depression and worthlessness at bay). some children, on the other hand, "kill" their own emotions and feelings, in order to keep their caretaker's love. in all cases children take the "blame and shame" for their "inadequacies" and idealize the parents or caretakers who inflicted the wounds. at times, reading this book, i would remember the fact that i too remember nothing of my childhood, except that it was "idilic". or was it? repression of memories and feelings can go straight into almost complete amnesia. i also thought of a few people i know, whose parents are strict and cold, who display very little emotion, but go thru life sucking love out of other people only to discard them when they get it. i would remember how i sometimes lash out at my son, like his being a child is a crime.. the same way i was loved for my achievements, i sometimes get demanding on him and show discontent when he does not comply. i thought of my son's difficult birth and 6 days in ER, without me, all alone. and i want to scream :( this book hit me like a hammer. i hope i read it on time. everyone should do the same, if not for their own sake, then for sake of their innocent children. oh, and one more thing: sentences are so damn long and sometimes barely comprehensible. the translation could have been done more in the spirit of english language.

This book is VERY dense but one of the most impactful books I've ever read. This is for anyone and everyone who has grown up with parents and felt too much or misunderstood. Honestly, I think most people could benefit from this book. However, be prepared to sit and think about the lessons contained in this book. It took me a few months to read because I would read a chapter or less, be hit with a huge realization about my past and experiences, and have to work through and release all the baggage. This is a powerful read that you should take your time with to experience the full benefits. I had touched on some of these themes in therapy but the author's examples and writing style just connected so many dots.

_The Drama of the Gifted Child_ hit me like a train with its plainspoken eloquence. I found it a deeply triggering read. If its contents intersect with your own experience of early childhood, I bet you will find this too. More than most books I've read in the "shrinky" literature, reading through this book is a piece of therapy unto itself. And for this reason, I've felt it change my life. Miller offers an extraordinarily stark, radical, and uncompromising narrative of generational trauma. Here's the core argument: the patient in infancy is conditioned into hiding her emotional needs by an insecure mother. She experiences contempt for her frailty. These experiences are repressed into the subconscious. They manifest later in life as mental illness, aberrant habits, and/or trouble with relationships. When the patient becomes a parent, she finally finds in her own child someone who can offer the unconditional love she needed from her mother in infancy. But the cycle perpetuates when the patient's child has inconvenient childlike needs that bring the patient's repressed memories too close to the surface. Experiencing, in therapy and at an emotional and not intellectual level, the pain of her mother's contempt brings out a cathartic mourning that can break the cycle. There are examples and they change. Sons and (to a lesser extent) fathers make appearances. Beyond that, this is pretty much the whole book. The brittle consistency Miller brings to this central dogma makes this volume stunningly repetitive given its brevity. It also makes the book less useful than it could be: given the black and white view of imperfect parenting as "original sin," it offers little guidance, for example, on how to be a better while imperfect parent. Either you go to therapy and experience an essential mourning of your childhood, or you're doomed. It offers little guidance that mental illnesses like depression could have parallel sources or parallel treatments. And it offers little guidance for how to navigate the other traumas in life that have nothing directly to do with parenting. Reaching into Alice Miller's history offers clues. And this is where things get really meta: the initial intrigue is to ask why this book by an author with such an Anglo sounding name was translated from the German. One goes to Wikipedia to learn that Alice Miller was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust without her whole family making it, the gyrations of her very name bearing witness to a cross-border struggle to survive. She repressed her war trauma, minimized her own therapy, kept her life history intensely private, and hurt her own son Martin grievously. Back to Amazon, Martin, also a therapist, recently wrote _The True Drama of the Gifted Child_ to tell us all about it. And thus the whole project of Alice Miller's career - of an emotional processing of trauma in therapy triumphing over intellectualized defense mechanisms - falls into context as an intellectualized defense mechanism. At the end of the book, Miller connects her theory of generational trauma to the horrors of fascism. Having learned Miller's life history makes this capstone to the book hard to un-see. This book is so powerful and potentially life-changing that I think it remains essential. Yet learning its context gives me reservations and says something enigmatic about humanity that I just can't quite cast aside.

I started working with a great psychologist/therapist last year to deal with a few issues that i had diagnosed in myself and also to deal with PTSD. In one of our sessions, much to my surprise, he linked these issues back to my childhood and my parents and especially my mother. Apparently my mother has highly narcissistic tendencies and my father, with his indifference, has played the role of the enabler. As i started to do more research and read more to understand so many complicated issues that are part of the human psyche, i came across this book. Please allow me to very honest and say that to this day i have not finished reading the whole book. This, not because it is a difficult or poorly written book. On the contrary, it is brilliant, eloquent, and provides enough examples to make the topic easily understood by everyone. I have not finished it because sometimes the truth hurts and it hurts deeply when one faces it's ugly part. It is forces you to look inside your own self, to analyze your thoughts and actions, and more than anything to accept the origin of your fears and insecurities. Read it and re-read it over and over again, because by understanding your past you can change the present and the future and even if you may not fully break free of the pain, at least you will not repeat the same mistakes with your children. I can not recommend this book enough, painful as it is to read it and face truths about one's self. You will become a better person in the end.

I saw this book recommended on self help subs multiple times, but someone recommended it to me after hearing my situation so I got it. This book is terrific. I'm ~8% in and it's not only answering questions I've had for months and connecting the dots for me, but also inspiring me to journal. Even though the book is ~150 pages long, it'll take me a while to go through because I'm drawing diagrams and making flow charts. What I got was worth the price that I paid, even if the rest of the pages are blank. I wanted to address the negative reviews: These types of books require prerequisite knowledge. For example, I read The Family prior to reading this book so I'm able to layer my knowledge. Before reading that, I did a lot of research online. You won't be able to get a lot out of the book if you don't expose yourself to this information before. This is not a beginner book. So far what I've read covers your behavior, why you do what you do. Making the unconscious conscious is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. This is the first step of the healing process. Without this, you can't heel. Several people were concerned about heeling, without really understanding what that means. This book requires you to be really honest yourself. Not everyone is psychologically capable of going there. So this book isn't for everyone. The book is about caretakers of the child, not just *the mother* - it's really interesting that people are criticizing the author for this. They're fixated on a surface level issue which is causing them to be unable to go deeper. Same with people criticizing the title of the book... it's laughable.

I think this book holds some insights about the way even “normal” childhood and child-rearing can create dysfunctional behavior in adulthood, and other ideas like the connection between depression and grandiosity. But overall, this book reminds me of the worst therapist I ever had, whose preoccupation with her own father-daughter relationship led her to see in EVERY PATIENT that the source of all suffering was the father. This book overly focuses on the mother-child relationship, on the idealized mother as a fountain of pure goodness and the real mother as the source of all emotional harm, and it lacks useful advice about how to understand and heal those dysfunctions we do carry forward from our families of origin. I think it can be a useful read before parenting, to raise self-awareness about how we interact with our children. But ultimately the idealized mother portrayed in this book is neither possible nor actually ideal, because she is inhuman. I much prefer books about gentle parenting and respectful honest interactions with our children, which can also help us understand the ways that we did not receive that respect without the psychodrama and mother-focus of this book.

This tiny little unassuming book will stay with me for the rest of my life. Every therapist, coach, healer etc should read this before seeing their first client. Absolutely spellbinding.

Really amazing book. I have read a lot of "self help" and other types of psychology books. I have also done years of therapy. I always felt that there was something I was missing. I had decided to take a break from trying to re-hash my past experiences when I stumbled across this book. Alice describes me and my life perfectly in this book. It was really amazing to read and identify with so much of what she said. Almost everything she talks about was something I hadn't thought of before--at least in the way she explains things. There was also one thing she explains that I have had a profound experience with, that I have never heard of anyone else experiencing. It was amazing to hear that what I had experienced and worked through is actually common. One thing I could never understand about myself was why I still have low self-esteem. Intellectually, I can see why I (or anyone for that matter) should have self-esteem. I had read many books and done work in therapy specifically for this issue, but it still remained a complete mystery for me. The ideas in this book have given me the tools to become my "true self" and get that self-esteem I have always lacked. I admit that I have only just finished reading the book and have yet to do most of the work involved in this, but I feel incredibly confident that this is what I have been missing (for me with these type of therapeutic and self-revelations, you know when something speaks to you like this). I now have a plan for working through this issue and I feel confident I now know what has been holding me back. I can't recommend this book highly enough. I've already purchased another one of Alice's books and I hope it is as helpful for me as this one has been.