The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition | Alice Miller | An introspective look into a "different" process of being a child

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The Drama of the G...

	The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition Alice Miller Basic Books, 1996 - 144 pages average customer review:based on 76 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Looking back may be only way forward.

"The unexamined life is not worth living" wrote Socrates. If you find yourself on the path of this philosophy a good place to stop is with Alice Miller's short book, "Drama of the Gifted Child". The book, despite being written for therapist's, is unambiguous, easy to understand, and extremely compelling. The book addresses our secret-selves, which includes our subconscious selves, and asks the question, and I paraphrase here, how did you really feel back in the day? Miller contends that a trauma suffered in your young life will continue producing unhappiness, addiction, compulsion, fetishes, mental illness, and worse in your adult life. The only way out of pain is to face the truth. You must face what happened and how you really felt. Not how you were told to feel, not how you needed to feel to survive, not how you told yourself you should feel-- but how you really felt. This is easier read than done. The author states that you cannot undo the past, but through the process of mourning, obtained only by squarely facing the truth, you can free yourself and finally move forward. It is ultimately the story of your psychic pain and psychic redemption. Pain that could not be have been mourned at the point of trauma, and the devastating effects that pain can still be having on your life
I read reviews that stated Ms. Miller's book was too anti-family, too extreme, and too harsh. Of course, these reviewers probably have not lived lives of hopeless denial spinning in destructive unconscious circles, which only aggregate more psychological suffering. Drama of The Gifted Child unleashes Pandora's Box and demands you look squarely at the contents: the past, your secret self and perhaps more importantly, your fear of both.

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An introspective look into a "different" process of being a child

Not that I was gifted, but definitely the message about how we are rasied as children can effect our adult life. A must read for anyone who questions if they had a rough childhood that now contributes to a depressed or slilted look at adult life!!

Frustrating But Extremely Valuable

It is unsurprising that Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child has met with a certain amount of hostility from both the psychiatry and psychotherapy establishments. After all, she frowns both on the use of drugs and cognitive-behavioral techniques as treatments for anxiety--especially in children. She even suggests that those who would use such remedies may have unaddressed psychological problems of their own. What's worse, she appeals to no empirical studies (double-blind or not) in reaching these conclusions; in fact, a reader might be reluctant to conclude from this book that Miller would even be capable of assessing the value of a careful scientific study of this or that anti-anxiety treatment. So, as I've indicated above, this book is often very frustrating. But Miller's work is also quite valuable, at least in my opinion. Like Freud's contemporary Wilhelm Stekel, Miller may not be a systematic theoretician, but her extensive clinical experience has provided her with several important insights that I believe may be useful, particularly to parents of anxious children.

I suppose it's fairly obvious by now that there can be many causes of anxiety. Legitimate dangers, sleep deprivation, repressed thoughts or desires, negative reinforcements coincident with pleasurable activities, isolation, and lots of other things can factor into fearfulness. Similarly, we now know that various drugs, meditation techniques, cognitive "re-learning," and gradual desensitization can all help combat these feelings, at least sometimes. It's often forgotten, though, that there are other, simpler techniques that people often use, knowingly or unknowingly, to calm themselves or others down. They may turn on the TV, take a walk, call a friend or even have some ice cream. Perhaps the most common palliative used by parents to allay their children's anxieties is one that comes very naturally. We hug them, sit them on our laps, tell them we love them to pieces, and so on. Most parents don't need to be taught these techniques: we come by them almost biologically. It is interesting to note, however, that this most basic of anti-anxiety medicines is, to a certain extent, inconsistent with all the others because it indicates complete acceptance of the sufferers' current condition. While desensitization, meditation and the rest suggest a certain level of dissatisfaction with the anxious individual, at least in his/her present state, the concentrated care provided by the simple comfort-giver is pure and unconditional. It says "I love you, and I'm fine with you no matter what." There's no rush to distract, improve matters, make things different. Furthermore, Miller suggests that many of those advocating other means to improved mental health are themselves frantic: in the case of stressed parents, it may be that their children are spooking them because they're unable to deal with their own unresolved anxieties. And this may be a result of the fact that their own parents didn't manage things quite right when they were kids.

While Miller's book isn't specifically a how-to book for parents, but rather a general primer on the importance of looking into one's own childhood for clues to one's current psychological make-up, I believe there are important lessons for parents here. Her position seems to imply that when a `gifted' (i.e. sensitive) child is frightened, perhaps won't go to school, is afraid of the dark, or can't be alone, rushing in with `cures' may just make things worse. The results of such attempted interventions will be familiar to many parents: "You know that you have to go to school." "But I can't go to school, my head hurts too much!" "What do you think is so horrible about school anyways?" "I don't know!" "Well, you must not be breathing correctly or you'd feel better." "I CAN'T!" Etc. Miller's work suggests the merits of an alternative approach: that of acceptance--not only of the child, but even of the condition itself. What she has noticed in her adult patients (and herself) is that where that sort of unconditional acceptance was lacking in childhood, the life of the grown-up is likely to have been difficult, or worse. A feeling of dissatisfaction, incompetance and unhappiness may have haunted the adult.

What will be amazing to some (and, surprisingly, what Miller doesn't really go into in her book) is how nicely this apparently basic lesson works for both kinds and their parents during the child-rearing years. A number of our friends, (some, like me, freaked out pseudo-therapists themselves) have discovered along with us that in many cases, if we will do no more than sit quietly with a troubled child, making no attempts to distract her, guide her meditations, help her breathe, convince her of the harmlessness of the feared item, or otherwise re-tool, within minutes, everything will be fine. Not only our children, but we too have to "let it be." If we can just look our kids in the eye, tell them how much we love them, and wait out these storms with them, we'll be amazed how unlikely they are to actually fall to pieces. In any event, Miller illustrates quite scarily that if we can't do this, we're failing in basic parenthood, and our children will suffer as adults. For what it's worth, this has been an important lesson for me. In spite of her anecdotal approach, I believe Alice Miller is on to something that not only will be helpful for many unhappy individuals, but that many parents desperately need to learn.

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The Best Out There, But Flawed

Alice Miller, perhaps the best published psychology writer to date, opens "The Drama of the Gifted Child" with this classic, timeless pearl: "Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood." If only she could apply this fully to herself.

In the afterward of the 1997 edition she rejects this possibility outright: "I spent a long time looking for a total exploration of my childhood history. Now I see that this was hubris" [her italics]. Alice Miller gave up her quest for enlightenment, compromised to a life of partial mental illness, and in so doing lost her place as a worthwhile role model for the seeker of the full truth.

But the essence of her theory holds nonetheless. She defends the wounded child like no other published writer to date, she brilliantly traces the roots of adult pathology back to childhood trauma, and she thinks outside the box of conventional psychology and is not afraid to say so.

Alice Miller lives split within. A clear boundary separates her amazing, conscious healthiness from the disturbing, unconscious, unresolved feelings emanating from her still-buried trauma. The clearest example of this comes from her 1995 interview in the German-language magazine Psychologie Heute. Here (translated from German), she refers to the eruption of her own unresolved trauma when she began primal therapy in the late 1980s or early 1990s: "At the end of these three weeks my feelings were in a turmoil, so that I could not find sleep, that for the first time in my life I thought of suicide, and had anxiety verging on the psychotic. I was already fearful of this therapy that robbed my organism of sleep, but I could nowhere escape it."

This reveals a disturbed person, one who not only allowed herself to become trapped in an abusive therapy, but had the capacity to break into near-psychosis over it. And this is years after she wrote The Drama of the Gifted Child, which focuses on the consequences of not healing from trauma! It is hypocritical that someone who wrote and still writes in such a confident tone about unearthing buried trauma could remain so out of touch with her own.

Bound to denial, Alice Miller is unable to fully indict her own parents, and by extension all parents - herself included, as she is a mother of two - for their traumatizing behavior. This partially poisons her work, as it directly forces her to temper the power of her own message.

Without realizing it applied to her, she herself noted this as inevitable. Drama, pg. 20: "If we have never consciously lived through this despair and the resulting rage, and therefore have never been able to work through it, we will be in danger of transferring this situation, which then would remain unconscious, onto our patients." And I might add in her case: onto her readers as well! (And of course onto her children.)

But Alice Miller, so blocked in her own emotional growth, cannot fathom a genuinely emotionally resolved adult. As such, she compromises her ideals and turns a blind eye toward a certain level of pathological behavior. This allows her to give unhealed parents her tacit consent to procreate. She ignores both their troubling motives and the damage they will inevitably wreak on their children. At times she even buries her head in the sand further and suggests that perfect parents do exist out there, and in so doing allows unhealed parents to absorb her ferociously truthful message in the same way she has: without having to apply it to the depths of their own flaws.

Similarly, although she is an outspoken proponent of therapy, Alice Miller believes that no one with fully healthy motives would ever enter the field of psychotherapy. She pathologizes the therapist's heightened sensitivity as a remnant of his response to his needy parents of childhood. Although this is true for many therapists, including Alice Miller herself, she cannot fathom that a healed therapist would derive his power from the depths of his true self.

The fact that The Drama Of Gifted Child really is the best on the shelves is a sign of how unevolved and unresolved our world remains.

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