One's own personality, desires, needs and emotions are suppressed to create a projected perfection which attracts love and awe. I'm fairly certain that my parents' toilet training techniques contribued nothing to why I'm a hot mess. Forthright and accessible, the book related how children protect themselves and their parents from the truth about the bad parenting they have received - even idealising their parents and striving painfully to earn their approval.

Q. children, but about those who were able to survive an abusive childhood because they developed an adequate defense system. The thing about these people, though, is that their parents were fundamentally flawed and repeated these actions over and over again.

As I look forward to becoming a parent myself within the next few months (against Larkin's advice, if you know the rest of the poem) I can only hope to not fuck up my child, or at least to fuck them up as little as possible.

With her first bestseller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, published a quarter of a century ago, Miller sent an entire generation into therapy when she wrote about how parents scar their children not only by glaring instances of cruelty and physical punishment but also through humiliation, neglect and inattention. Miller references Ingmar Bergman who described in great detail the violent abuse his brother faced at his father's hands, but had no recollection of any mistreatment to himself.

Hermann, who was considered almost a model of good behavior in the boys’ house is sometimes hardly to be borne. She has two (adult) children, about whom she has said: "I never hit them but I was sometimes careless and neglecting to my first child out of ignorance.

Another thing that I found helpful was to re-read Drama of the Gifted Child some time after reading For Your Own Good, to see how much more I was able to learn from it after having some time to react emotionally to what I had read the first time.This is all pretty simplified, the book is brief and well worth reading particularly if you see aspects of yourself or someone you know in the above.

When you read this book, you will come face to face with your own childhood and start the journey to your own story. Another interesting chapter deals with the "process of parental derision" and how it results in humiliation and possible psychic trauma of the child.

I would recommend it for anyone that has issues w their parents that they want some perspective on or anyone concerned about possibly passing on the legacy of their own difficulties to their children, however inadvertently. As a result, in 1988 she resigned from the International Psychhoanalytical Association and, in 1995, revised 'The Drama of being a Child'.