Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

And I do not say such things lightly. As a survivor of childhood abuse her books have helped me understand myself so much and helped me heal myself and be my OWN compassionate witness. I think her books should be required reading in junior high schools so that these young adults will learn they DO NOT have to repeat the mistakes of the adults around them if they ever have children themselves and also help them realize just how much damage has been done to them (if any) in the name of a 'proper upbringing' or out and out abuse.

These books are not easy reading especially if you have been abused yourself but they are WORTH IT! Alice Miller's books have helped me make myself a better and *healthier* person.

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.

Dr. Alice Miller is to be commended for her never-ending work, and delving, into the deep, dark, limitless oceans of the un-worked through human mind, the last, and Ignored, Frontier. Her courage in facing the Truth and revealing it, ONLY to the WILLING reader, is to be genuinely admired. This Society owes her a great debt in her courage in facing her own personal truth and revealing the DEVASTATING FACTS about children in the hands of merciless, conscienceless, violent, justifying "adults". The reason this society appears such a mess is because of the very adults this WONDERFUL writer describes, as they raise the children we will face as adults, in our daily lives. If every parent on Earth were as conscious, honest, courageous and kind as Dr. Alice Miller, this planet would be The Paradise we all Pray for.

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.

A quick perusal of the reviews here, as well as the Kirkus Review above, is indicative. I'd heard from colleagues that Miller had become a broken record in her later books; that she was herself stuck in the all-or-nothing, all-right-or-all-wring, all-good-or-all-bad absolutism of her native German culture; and that she had never grasped what the other big names in the Second Wave of mass market trauma theory have grasped.

Claudia Black, Janet Woititz, John Bradshaw, Pia Mellody, Bruce Perry and Bessel van der Kolk (more or less the "Adult Children of Alcoholics" gang) all appear to undertstand that forgiveness of the perp's behavior is =not= the issue. Forgiveness of the perp's =own= history of abuse =is= a significant factor in recovery for the adult abused as a child. Interestingly, the "ACA gang" owes much of its understanding of what's required to heal from direct personal or professional experience in the trenches with tens of thousands of what we called "AMaCs" (adults molested as children) in the '90s.

Miller made mistakes, but she also played a =major= role in recharting the developmental course of psychotherapy from the dogmatic, Freudian, psychoanalytic belief in the "naturally naughty child" to modern trauma theory. (Sadly, Freud's contemporary, Pierre Janet, stuck with his guns about molestation, incest, invalidation, battering and all that, and gave the French a =century's= head start on the German and English speakers. Janet's late-19th-century work was not translated into English until the 1970s and '80s, however.)

Miller almost fell into the same trap as Laura Davis, Ellen Bass, Judith Lewis Herman, Dianna Russell, Yvonne Dolan and other militant feminist therapists of the '70s and '80s: Revenge, retribution and reprisal. (It was SOP in the '80s to arrange confrontations and litigations against one's parents. Mercifully, the awful lessons learned -- including severe RE-traumatization of the victims -- led to more mature, considered, pragmatic, functional and effective interventions.)

Regardless, the mental health professional who understands all this will get plenty of value from Miller's work, even including her later rants such as this. Miller's =gift= is that she identifies so strongly with the victims that her emotion-saturated, verbal descriptions are just what the doctor ordered for those having difficulty working through the issues that very likely led them in the direction of becoming psychotherapists to begin with. And if =we= have not crossed the raging river of "unprocessed material," how are =we= supposed to play "Moses" for anyone else?

Non-professionals, however, will be far better served by reading Miller's earlier =Prisoners of Childhood=, =The Drama of the Gifted Child=, =For Your Own Good= and/or =Thou Shalt Not Be Aware=.

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.

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.

I have lived through my shares of trials and truibulations and I did not find this book helpful but rather hurtful. I draw my conclusion by her example of Hilter. Hilter used a form of repetative,dogmatic approaches amongst his people. Although he is used, as an example to make her point, I felt that she was headed in the same direction. HITler repeatd a word over and over until it was in memory and it was now a part of their speech. In reading this book I felt that the first half was just a repeat of the same message over and over again. I am, no stranger to my past, but in the journey of it, I found that forgiveness is essential. "As if one could suffer more harm from any enemy than one suffers from the hatred which one feels against him; or as if one could do more harm to an enemy by any kind of persecution than one does to one's own soul by the mere act of hating"