of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting by Alice Miller

QUOTES BY ALICE MILLER (of 84) | A-Z Quotes TOP 25 QUOTES BY ALICE MILLER (of 84) | A-Z Quotes

Alice Miller helps us to see the power and freedom in authentic communication, the frank exchanges that we desire. This is something that the traditional morality of therapy, religion and parenting expectations often hide in the disguise of ‘honor thy father and mother’ even when they dishonor you, the child. Alice Miller gives us way of understanding and acting that permits us to unflinchingly remove the disguise. As Alice Miller knows and makes so clear, the body remembers all the pain and suffering of childhood. Readers will find much in this book that resonates with their own experiences and learn how to confront the overt and covert traumas of their own childhoods.” Philip Greven, professor emeritus, Rutgers University and author of Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse

Norton, 2005

I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.” What can we hear when we listen to the voice of childhood experience and its power in our adult lives? After reading The Body Never Lies we can, if we are fortunate to have positive enlightened witnesses direct their words to us, hear voices that confirmed our individuality and human dignity in our childhoods, voices that recognized our authentic selves and our subjective, emotional, experience based ‘truths’, and permitted us to express those truths in our bodily health and relationships. Alice Miller’s “The Body Never Lies” is a provocation for those who are intent on denying that there is a relationship between how children are being treated and how they, later as adults, live their lives. They will fight against this book with those sad beliefs, which they learned in their childhoods and never questioned or left behind. But for those, for whom these connections are a fact and who are willing to explore their own past, their own lives and childhood suffering, this book provides great relief, even liberation. lives as adults, the way in which so many opportunities have been destroyed and so much misery passed on unintentionally to the next generation. This tragic realization is only possible if we stop weighing the good points of our parents against the bad. If we persist in doing that, we will relapse into compassion, into the denial of the cruelties we have been subjected to, all because we believe we must take a “balanced” view of things. My conviction is that this reflects the efforts undertaken by the children we once were. The adult perspective must reject this balancing process because it is confusing and gets in the way of our own lives. Of course, people who were never beaten in childhood, who were never subjected to sexual abuse, do not need to do this work. They can enjoy the good feelings they have in the company of their parents, they can quite rightly call them love, and they do not need to deny themselves in any way. The burden of such “work” weighs on individuals who have been abused and then only if they are not willing to pay for self-deception with physical illness.”

The body never lies | Alice Miller en The body never lies | Alice Miller en

For me [ ‘The Body Never Lies’] feels more entrenched in the intensity, the emotions, and the energy. So to me, it feels like an amplified version of ‘Zero’ with a little more walls removed from us on an emotional level too.”– Jahan Yousaf, Krewella, We Rave You What betrayal? We know that child abuse and child neglect are pervasive and destructive. And we know that violence toward children is stored within them and, later in life, they will turn the violence on themselves—in depression, drug addiction, illness, suicide, or some other form of early death. And, according to Tears for Fears, “when life begins with needles and pins, it ends with swords and knives.” Sometimes these swords and knives are directed at other people—sometimes at whole nations. We have to liberate ourselves from the propaganda imposed on us – and enforced on us on pain of punishment – by conventional morality. This book calls for a higher morality, as it applies to parenthood. We cannot truly love our parents, she asserts, until we are liberated from the infantile attachment, the idolatry, that trapped us in childhood. Almost all my books have aroused conflicting responses. But the emotional intensity with which the statements I make in my latest book have been affirmed or rejected is remarkable indeed. The impression I have is that this intensity of feeling is an indirect expression of the extent to which the readers in question are close to, or remote from, their own selves. You can find all of Giorgi’s research on his blog www.haidut.me You can find his research products at www.idealabsdc.com

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Though Alice Miller does not directly do so, The Body Never Lies offers us the possibility of rewriting the Forth Commandment from a Child-Centered Perspective. The new commandment would emphasize the parental duty to foster and respect the authentic personhood of children rather than the children’s duty to submit to parental domination and personal self-denial. Today, my guest is independent researcher Giorgi Dinkov, whose focus is on biochemistry and physiology. Giorgi has become a great resource for me, which has helped with so many clients, and so I wanted his biology and chemistry expertise to talk about all things supplementation. On her life journey of research and writing, Alice Miller has gained great inner freedom and strength. In `The Body Never Lies’, she courageously questions traditional morality and inspires us to face the often life long pain that children suffer through their parents. Her profound insights into this vital relationship create a truthful vision of man and his coercion to be destructive and self-destructive. Her visionary humanity leads the way into a new era, where the source of needless human suffering is movingly and powerfully recognized. THE BODY NEVER LIES is a book of healing, and its message continues the important research that earned Miller worldwide fame in her best-selling original work, The Drama of the Gifted Child. In all her writing, Miller proves herself a courageous, pioneering mind in exploring the most taboo of psychological subjects — cruel parenting. Her work is remarkable for its brilliant insight into the psychology of some of the greatest thinkers of Western history and its intimate portrayal of more ordinary individuals’ long-term damage from child abuse, from her patients’ to her own. Offering systemic analysis of how to approach therapy and live outside the traditions of a society governed by the fourth commandment, THE BODY NEVER LIES is necessary reading for all individuals committed to leading an enlightened and compassionate existence. THE TRADITION OF sacrificing children is deeply rooted in most cultures and religions. For this reason it is also tolerated, and indeed commended, in our western civilization. Naturally, we no longer sacrifice our sons and daughters on the altar of God, as in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. But at birth and throughout their later upbringing, we instill in them the necessity to love, honor, and respect us, to do their best for us, to satisfy our ambitions—in short, to give us everything our parents denied us. We call this decency and morality. Children rarely have any choice in the matter. All their lives, they will force themselves to offer their parents something that they neither possess nor have any knowledge of, quite simply because they have never been given it: genuine, unconditional love that does not merely serve to gratify the needs of the recipient. Yet they will continue to strive in this direction because even as adults they still believe that they need their parents and because, despite all the disappointments they have experienced, they still hope for some token of genuine affection from those parents. Such”

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In her brilliant book, Alice Miller uses famous people’s lives, like Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, to teach us all a concept that is common in all of our lives—that unhealed trauma creates illness. I loved this book.”– Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D., author of The New Feminine Brain and Awakening Intuition Today I want to ask him about his work specializing in people with blood sugar handling issues and insulin resistance ie some people have these issues and don’t have diabetes, why its happening and what we can do about it rather than cutting out entire food groups from our diet and going on drugs, that just cascade into needing more and more drugs. After the publication of the original German version of The Body Never Lies in March 2004, many readers wrote to me saying how relieved they were that they no longer had to feign feelings they did not really have, or to deny feelings that kept on reasserting themselves. But in other responses, notably in the press, I have found indications of a fundamental misunderstanding that I myself may have contributed to by using the word “mistreatment” in a much broader sense than is usually the case. 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.”I encourage you to listen to her podcast The Warrior School Podcast where you can here the facets of the Long Road Home broken down into bite size pieces as well as a multitude of tips and knowledge for your strength training.