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This “rare and compelling” (New York Magazine) bestseller examines childhood trauma and the enduring effects it has on an individual’s management of repressed anger and pain.
Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer—and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.
Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents’ expectations and win their “love.” Alice Miller writes, “When I used the word ‘gifted’ in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb…. Without this ‘gift’ offered us by nature, we would not have survived.” But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.
From the Publisher
Publisher : Basic Books; 3rd edition (January 1, 1997)
Language : English
Paperback : 136 pages
ISBN-10 : 0465016901
ISBN-13 : 978-0465016907
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 5.3 x 0.5 x 7.95 inches
4.5
Reviewer: Diplomat
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Brilliant, eloquent, truthful, and painful.
Review: I started working with a great psychologist/therapist last year to deal with a few issues that i had diagnosed in myself and also to deal with PTSD. In one of our sessions, much to my surprise, he linked these issues back to my childhood and my parents and especially my mother. Apparently my mother has highly narcissistic tendencies and my father, with his indifference, has played the role of the enabler. As i started to do more research and read more to understand so many complicated issues that are part of the human psyche, i came across this book. Please allow me to very honest and say that to this day i have not finished reading the whole book. This, not because it is a difficult or poorly written book. On the contrary, it is brilliant, eloquent, and provides enough examples to make the topic easily understood by everyone. I have not finished it because sometimes the truth hurts and it hurts deeply when one faces it’s ugly part. It is forces you to look inside your own self, to analyze your thoughts and actions, and more than anything to accept the origin of your fears and insecurities. Read it and re-read it over and over again, because by understanding your past you can change the present and the future and even if you may not fully break free of the pain, at least you will not repeat the same mistakes with your children. I can not recommend this book enough, painful as it is to read it and face truths about one’s self. You will become a better person in the end.
Reviewer: Avid dancer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Mind blowing and awesome
Review: Searched my Bible for decades but found the answer to my questions right here in this little book. So glad I lived long enough to read it. Im telling you every human being needs to read this book before even considering being a parent. Even so, just read it to grow and gain Knowledge of the past and what happened does not change ANYTHING from your past but it will most CERTAINLY affect your here and now and your future and the future of the next generation. Very effective and powerful reading.
Reviewer: Raman
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Enigmatic
Review: _The Drama of the Gifted Child_ hit me like a train with its plainspoken eloquence. I found it a deeply triggering read. If its contents intersect with your own experience of early childhood, I bet you will find this too. More than most books I’ve read in the “shrinky” literature, reading through this book is a piece of therapy unto itself. And for this reason, I’ve felt it change my life.Miller offers an extraordinarily stark, radical, and uncompromising narrative of generational trauma. Here’s the core argument: the patient in infancy is conditioned into hiding her emotional needs by an insecure mother. She experiences contempt for her frailty. These experiences are repressed into the subconscious. They manifest later in life as mental illness, aberrant habits, and/or trouble with relationships. When the patient becomes a parent, she finally finds in her own child someone who can offer the unconditional love she needed from her mother in infancy. But the cycle perpetuates when the patient’s child has inconvenient childlike needs that bring the patient’s repressed memories too close to the surface. Experiencing, in therapy and at an emotional and not intellectual level, the pain of her mother’s contempt brings out a cathartic mourning that can break the cycle.There are examples and they change. Sons and (to a lesser extent) fathers make appearances. Beyond that, this is pretty much the whole book.The brittle consistency Miller brings to this central dogma makes this volume stunningly repetitive given its brevity. It also makes the book less useful than it could be: given the black and white view of imperfect parenting as “original sin,” it offers little guidance, for example, on how to be a better while imperfect parent. Either you go to therapy and experience an essential mourning of your childhood, or you’re doomed. It offers little guidance that mental illnesses like depression could have parallel sources or parallel treatments. And it offers little guidance for how to navigate the other traumas in life that have nothing directly to do with parenting.Reaching into Alice Miller’s history offers clues. And this is where things get really meta: the initial intrigue is to ask why this book by an author with such an Anglo sounding name was translated from the German. One goes to Wikipedia to learn that Alice Miller was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust without her whole family making it, the gyrations of her very name bearing witness to a cross-border struggle to survive. She repressed her war trauma, minimized her own therapy, kept her life history intensely private, and hurt her own son Martin grievously. Back to Amazon, Martin, also a therapist, recently wrote _The True Drama of the Gifted Child_ to tell us all about it. And thus the whole project of Alice Miller’s career – of an emotional processing of trauma in therapy triumphing over intellectualized defense mechanisms – falls into context as an intellectualized defense mechanism. At the end of the book, Miller connects her theory of generational trauma to the horrors of fascism. Having learned Miller’s life history makes this capstone to the book hard to un-see.This book is so powerful and potentially life-changing that I think it remains essential. Yet learning its context gives me reservations and says something enigmatic about humanity that I just can’t quite cast aside.
Reviewer: Itzel
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Muy buen libro para entender muchas cosas. El lenguaje es sencillo pero al estar en inglés la traducción sà debe leerse un par de veces el mismo párrafo para entender la idea. Yo lo compré porque ya habÃa leÃdo uno anterior “El cuerpo nunca miente” y me gustó. La autora es directa y pone ejemplos de pacientes. Hay términos que se pueden cuestionar o investigar pero hay que entender o leer más a la autora.
Reviewer: Customer77
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A must read for anyone who has experienced childhood trauma and are interested in overcoming it. Awareness is the first step towards recovery.
Reviewer: JOSE BALAGUER ALEDON
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Muy interesante aunque cuesta leerlo, debido a la forma de escribir del autor. En todo caso es un gran libro que no deja al lector indiferente. Recomiendo su lectura pero con paciencia
Reviewer: Aleksandar Stojanovic
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Hefty food, not easy to digest but very nurturing⦠recommended to everyone in search of some deeper truth to be unhidden.
Reviewer: Martha
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Alice Miller was a true maverick in what she preached in that people from babies on deserve love, care, dignity and respect. She also deserves credit for her beliefs in revisiting childhood trauma with a trained professional in order to be able to free oneself from it. A must read for those trying to understand the pain of their childhood. Even more important to getting the full picture is to read her son Martin Millerâs book âThe True Drama Of The Gifted Child!â Martin tells the truth about his horrendous childhood at the hands of Alice and her husband, his father, yet Martin is able to rise above his own pain, understand his motherâs life trauma and come out on top. Martin is my hero and Alice is too in that she refused to back down from her beliefs of the importance of childâs right!
