Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth

Rating:
Summary: Her best book
Review: I recommend this book to anyone that hasn't read Alice Miller. I think this is her best, most accessible, most on target books to date. She writes from personal experience not just theory and her 'training" and it is compelling.

Rating:
Summary: DISAPPOINTING TO SAY THE LEAST!
Review: I would have expected much greater things from Miller than what is written here. As a counsellor with over thirty years experience, and having suffered abuse as a child myself, I can only say that acceptance and forgiveness are part of the healing process. While not everyone achieves that level, those who do truly come to terms with their past, and the ability to forgive, have a greater opportunity of finding happiness, peace and contentment in the years to come. Not only does it set the spirit free, but they find they are no longer emotionally chained to the burdens of their past.

However, what really troubled me about the book is that I found the author to have a very condescending tone throughout the book and sometimes the tone almost had a bitter quality to it, which tells me that perhaps the author, herself, has not quite healed and the purpose of writing of this book may have been an attempt at self-therapy with the hope of coming to terms with her own abuse. My heart goes out to her and I hope she will, indeed, find peace, forgiveness and healing. While I was disappointed in the book, I do give the author two stars for having the courage to disclose her own abuse; it is a feat much easier said than done.

Rating:
Summary: DISAPPOINTING TO SAY THE LEAST!
Review: I would have expected much greater things from Miller than what is written here. As a counsellor with over thirty years experience, and having suffered abuse as a child myself, I can only say that acceptance and forgiveness are part of the healing process. While not everyone achieves that level, those who do truly come to terms with their past, and the ability to forgive, have a greater opportunity of finding happiness, peace and contentment in the years to come. Not only does it set the spirit free, but they find they are no longer emotionally chained to the burdens of their past.

However, what really troubled me about the book is that I found the author to have a very condescending tone throughout the book and sometimes the tone almost had a bitter quality to it, which tells me that perhaps the author, herself, has not quite healed and the purpose of writing of this book may have been an attempt at self-therapy with the hope of coming to terms with her own abuse. My heart goes out to her and I hope she will, indeed, find peace, forgiveness and healing. While I was disappointed in the book, I do give the author two stars for having the courage to disclose her own abuse; it is a feat much easier said than done.

Rating:
Summary: Truth is painful and healing
Review: Never before have I read words that were so profound. Dr. Miller is the bravest and most courageous person since Dr.Seigmond Freud. He too, had been rebuked by all his medical peers, yet he had the answer dead correct. Women who had experienced sexual hysteria as young adults had been indeed sexually violated as a children.
Dr. Alice Miller has indeed shed new light to where evil and abuse is created. We are still in the Dark Ages of how truly one is effected by pain, abandonment, neglect, threats, ritualistic beatings, isolation, spankings, intimidating looks, witnessing abuse and horror,lost, frightened, screams not answered, not comforted and so on as a newborn and throughout his formative years.
The irony is, we as a society will not and can not take responsibility of our own creation of evil and hatred due to ignorance, arrogance and denial.

Rating:
Summary: Didn't live up to my expectations
Review: This book is very similar to Miller's other work. She is focussed on child abuse, and how our society's unwillingness to take child abuse seriously is destroying our world. Miller is a good writer; that is not the problem I had with the book.

What I didn't like about the book was that it was simplistic, and the author seemed to engage in circular arguments. If Hitler, Stalin, et al, became dictators because they were abused, shouldn't all of us who were abused be like that? She is looking for causal relationships where there are only correlations, at best.

As well, I do not agree with her that forgiveness automatically leads to denial. I think that forgiveness is a necessary part of the healing process. Regardless, she doesn't give good evidence to support her arguments.

I also found that Miller came across as arrogant. She quoted from her own books a great deal, as well as quoting from letters she has received from fans of her work. The self congratulatory tone gets old quickly. The book seems disjointed; it is more like a collection of essays than a full fledged book. There were editting problems in my copy. In chapter 9 there were passages that were ommitted and some that were repeated. It appears the typesetting was off in this chapter. This made for a frustrating reading experience, made worse by the fact that this chapter had some of the more important material.