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Summary: Read This Book at Your Peril
Review: ....but I'm glad I found it now! Alice Millers words and examples brought me inner peace that only comes with solving the painful mystery of abuse without cause that has plagued my psyche for many, many years. Thank you reviewers for it is your words that brought me to read this valuable gem. This masterpeice should be required reading for humans well BEFORE they undertake the great responsibility or child rearing. I am now reading "Drama Of the Gifted Child" and most likely will continue on to all her books. My highest respect and praises for the gift Alice Miller's work has given to the world.
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Summary: I needed this book years ago.....
Review: ....but I'm glad I found it now! Alice Millers words and examples brought me inner peace that only comes with solving the painful mystery of abuse without cause that has plagued my psyche for many, many years. Thank you reviewers for it is your words that brought me to read this valuable gem. This masterpeice should be required reading for humans well BEFORE they undertake the great responsibility or child rearing. I am now reading "Drama Of the Gifted Child" and most likely will continue on to all her books. My highest respect and praises for the gift Alice Miller's work has given to the world.
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Summary: To summarize:
Review: Children behave as well as they are treated and grow up to continue the behavior over and over and over again. If only there were more enlightened prominent people who thinks like she does to spread the message on a more grand scale worldwide. Best $ spent.
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Summary: Invasion of my soul
Review: Data: I am 51 years old; 2 sons, 10 and 13; married 15 years; and I have been on a path of healing and growth since 1994. I read 'Drama of the Gifted Child' 5 years ago. Since then I have read dozens of inner-work book. Lately, I had have been feeling that I have learned all I needed to know about my wounds and it was time to move on. "Time for action, not reflection," I say to myself. I doubtfully picked up 'For Your Own Good,' last week in a used book store. After all, revisiting 'childhood' issues was wasting my time. Boom! This book has invaded my soul and my heart. Alice Miller has touched on one of the greatest 'family secrets' in the world as she describes the devastating effect of 'child rearing.' (If you like John Bradshaw, Miller will touch the same raw nerve.) The hurt we pass on to our children, that I have passed on to my children, will haunt me for the rest of my days. It is so clear and so obvious once we step back and look at how we parents treat our children. I can see clearly how I dumped my frustration, hurt and pain on my kids...minute by minute, day by day. As they grow into adolescence I see all of this more clearly. While Miller's ideas, and this book, are uncomfortable for adults, she has empowered me to proceed more consciously for the rest of my life in all my dealings with my kids. For that I feel blessed. What is a mystery, as others have noted, is why Miller's simple and direct ideas have received so little welcome in our world. Instead we build more prisons, hire more police, pass more laws, and express total bewilderment at the behaviour of the children whom we have tried to manipulate, mold, and control since their births. Who is accountable here? Let any person with guts and the desire to know the real truth about who he/she is tackle this book. It WILL be painful...and it WILL be liberating.
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Summary: German Warfare
Review: I always said that my home was a battleground because of the unaccountable violence. In Ms. Miller's book I read about the cruel methods of childhood upbringing from the German Republic, that are standard. In her depiction of Hitler's childhood, I cried because I found my father in the pages of a book. It was so strange to feel someone had a crystal ball into my home. The same methods employed by Hitler's father, my grandfather inflicted corporeal punishment upon my father. I learned of my father's pain, embarrassment & shame. I learned, he could not help himself. Cruel as it was for me, because I had to let go of my own hate, I emphasized w/his pain & I finally cried for his own lost childhood.
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Summary: America Wake Up - Stop Terrorizing Our Children
Review: I dedicate this review to our Young People: American psychologists, church elders and those adult who need this kind of help this book offers, refuse to look at these writings of Alice Miller. They have either victimized or have been a vitim - survivor - and, they can't, at this time look at this pain. Counsellors as well, want to show some success so they give a quick fix, but hardly ever look at the real issues. Until we look at this book and other writings, by Alice Miller, we Americans will live in denial, deceit and we will suffer and cause others to suffer unnecessarily. Why does the pain of the past need to be released? Alice miller's writing are profusely being ignored and as a result our children are killing each other. Until we read and digest these ideas these killings in high schools will continue. These children are very unhappy, to say the least, but why? Why not take a look at these writings? Are we afraid of truth? Americans are supposed to be so brave but are we? We can hardly be so smart if these killings in the high schools are continuing? The only way they will stop is not the tough love crap that "the Sally" Jesse Raphael shows portry. The children she is suppossedly helping are being exploited and will one day realize what their parents and Sally has done to embarrass them. By then, they will be much more hurt and angry, and Sally will be in her retired years and in her rocking chair not caring about the exploitation of those children that she had on her shows. She is not alone. There is the Dr.James Dobson's as well that still push hitting and controlling our young people. Anything By Dr.James Dobson ought to be laughed at for he is still controlling and living or trying to live in the medieval ages. The children, the teenagers, and other young people, pleas take the time and read this book; and you won't have to carry the crap your parents are putting on you. You are not to blame. You didn't make the world this horrible place. The older generation handed you this place. Don't take the blame. Let's do more than survive. Find out where the real problem comes from and empower yourself. Young people and I am sorry to use this term, but I don't know any other term to address you. So please accept my apology. Don't wait until you get older. Read this and all other books by Alice miller. regalman@usa.net signing off...for now
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Summary: Alice Millers offers help like no other.
Review: I have recovered from agoraphobia and drug addiction and now to the root of my problems: childhood traumas. We are so busy or so scared to slow down and search for truth. Or are we looking down the wrong roads for the real reasons. America will probably have to experience more killings and will probably have to go down the tubes before we wake up. I'm sorry that we are so asleep. The twelve steps hardly touch the truth. The twelve programs are just a refurbishing of old useless guilt ridden ideas. In other words, another road of binding circles. Not the people, but the continued closed mindedness of recovery centers need to give up the almighty dollar and look at miller's writings. When you look at continued suffering there is probably a buck to made. Recovery centers and twelve step programs continue to create dependency. If people would point the finger where it really belongs and we be allowed to express the hurt we get better and stay better. Alice Miller offers help like no other.
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Summary: Motivation for becoming involved with child abuse issues
Review: I suspect this book is better in the original German as it tends toward long-windedness, but even so I couldn't put it down. It is very much geared toward German readers but is very applicable to the rest of the world as well, especially those of us in the US. Alice Miller explores the roots of violence as the violence imparted to children, and who were not allowed to express the pain and suffering caused by the violence. She covers in great detail the child-rearing methods prevalent in Germany from the 1700's thru this century; and of course there are many parallels to the "methods" advocated in the US then and to this day. The explicit, stated reason of these methods was to break the will of the child, beginning with infancy. Yes, infancy. And how was that done? By depriving children of thier voice, their joy, their anger, sadness, the ability to listen to their body's cues such as hunger. She really drives home the way that the cycle of violence in families is perpetrated, and why it is so very important to break the chain. I will never again hesitate to empathise with a child who is being 'swatted' or otherwise humiliated by a parent. Children need to know that their emotions are valid, and we have an obligation to allow them to express these emotions. If you have any doubt that children are being deprived of their voice, read "On Becoming Babywise" by Ezzo and Bucknam. They begin at infancy by scheduling feeds for children and telling the parents to decide when playtime is. They do not respond to the cries of their children. They are also responsible for an overtly Christian (sort of) parenting method entitled "Preparation for Parenting". No disputes with the mentors are allowed in these programs, which is exactly what the parents are to be passing on to their children. As far as beating children, 20% of Coloradans recently surveyed said that is is fine for parents to beat their children with a wooden spoon. Focus on the Family actively advocates such beatings as a method of "discipline". Sadly, violence against children is still occurring around us.
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Summary: Enlightening!
Review: In her book, Miller talks about how children are brainwashed into believing that parental violence is a loving act, learn to equate hitting with love, and continue the cycle of violence with their own children. Hospitals should issue this book to every new parent. Maybe if more parents could read this book there would be fewer traumatized and battered children in our emergency rooms and psychiatric wards. A book this important should NOT be out of print.
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Summary: Read This Book at Your Peril
Review: It's a sobering thing to have the answers to the deepest questions most of us ever ask about the human condition. I wouldn't trade the insights gained from reading this book for my former uneducated "bliss," but knowing the truth exacts a price. Once you understand the 'emotional physics' of how violent adults begin as violated children, violated, moreover, by the very people who are supposed to love and protect them -- you will see the results of that treatment acted out on various levels all around you, in everyone you know - for none of us have escaped being damaged on some level by abusive child-rearing practices. The 'tough to live with' aspect of such insight is realizing how far too many people become either a Persecutor or a Victim, acting out the imbalance of power they were raised with - not by confronting those who first damaged them (usually their primary caregivers) but by seeking substitute targets to attack on levels from subtle (being a control freak at work and making the lives of your subordinates miserable) to grotesque (marching Jewish children into gas chambers and still being able to sleep at night.) While the entire book is horrifying in it's illumination of sanctioned, morally enshrined cruelty to children in society, it was Ms Miller's chapter on Adolf Hitler that struck the most powerful epiphany. How often in my life had I heard Hitler described as an "unnatural monster," as "sent by the Devil," as someone not human? Miller's analysis of not only Hitler but of his father's and mother's lives, how their damaged characters intersected to create the totalitarian regime that was Adolf's childhood home, sent absolute chills of knowing through me as I read: in a less virulent form, his childhood had been my own. (Dominating father who controlled everyone in the house with his moods and rages/Passive mother who was dependant on him for survival and too frightened of her husband to protect her child.) While many people have suffered this and worse, it is the intervention on some level of an "enlightened witness," Miller maintains, that gives an abused child a perspective other than the one he lives with in the abuse situation and so salvages, on some level, the value of his genuine self. Hitler's insatiable hatred clearly showed that no one was there for him in childhood; his targeting of the Jews was a way to release the pent-up hatred from a lifetime of beatings and humiliation, inflicted on him by a father he wasn't allowed to hate. ("Honor Thy Father & Thy Mother") As we all do on some level, he found a substitute target for his rage. Hitler was also a remarkably sensitive, artistically gifted child, but an upbringing filled with abuse turned his talent toward exploiting the dammed up anger in the German adults of his generation who had also been raised with loveless brutality. What a relief, after so many beatings, so much pain and coldness and inhumanity, to have someone they could hate with impunity! The six million Jews exterminated during World War II were not each personally escorted into gas chambers by Adolf Hitler: he had plenty of help. It was through the common thread of being constantly abused, plus being indoctrinated to mindlessly obey authority, however absurd or cruel the order, that gave so many Germans the go-ahead to project all of the aspects of their' childhood selves their' authoritarian parents considered unacceptable onto the Jews and then try to destroy them. (This in the subconscious belief that the parts of themselves they'd disowned would never return to earn them new parental punishments; by killing the 'bad' part of themselves, they would become upright, perfect and pure, with no flaws, no human faults - good enough at last for their perfectionist parents and never again to be beaten.) If I could ask only one question in all the universe with certainty of a genuine reply, it would be: why do we love and hate? Thanks to Ms. Miller's book, I can't ever again pretend not to know the answer. The question now is whether this knowledge will reach enough people in enough positions of power to prevent an even greater holocaust. Ms. Miller has proven that the seeds of genocide sit squarely in the palm of the hand upraised in violence against a child. Does that sound extreme? Owing to the depth of his humiliation and suffering, the absolute commandment forbidding expression of that suffering and the unstoppable need to vent the resulting rage, I'm convinced that, had Hitler got his hands on a nuclear arsenal, none of us would be here to debate the question.
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