Alice Miller: Transforming Ourselves, Our Children, Our World Through Empathy and Compassion

I copied and framed this photograph of author and psychologist Alice Miller and had it up in my home for years. As I began to absorb her books nearly 30 years ago, Alice Miller was among the first who I felt knew my story; even though we never met, I felt in this woman a heart with ears - something I had been starved for throughout my life at that time, and certainly through my childhood. Bless all those who bless our journeys and illuminate a Path With Heart. ♥ Molly

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Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away...
  

But thanks to facing our truth we can transform ourselves from the children who still live in us full of fear and denial into responsible, well informed adults who regained their empathy, so early stolen from them. By becoming feeling persons we can no longer deny that beating children is a criminal act that should be forbidden on the whole planet...

The prerequisite for true compassion for others is empathy with one’s own destiny, something a maltreated child can never develop because such a child cannot allow himself to feel his own pain. All criminals, including the cruelest of dictators, display this lack of empathy. They murder others (or have them murdered) without the slightest compunction. A child forced to suppress his own emotions will have no compassion for himself and consequently no compassion for others. This encourages criminal behavior that is frequently concealed behind moral, religious, or apparently progressive verbiage...

Giving the parents advices how to teach their child to behave doesn't open the path to their (the parents') own history, it only gives them more power and leave them often emotionally blind and thus still WITHOUT EMPATHY. For instance the often repeated advice to send the child away for "time out" is one of the many examples of advices how children should be maltreated when they are "nasty" because they are unhappy. Nobody would send a friend to a separated room when she cries without knowing yet the reason of her distress but doing this with an unhappy child is often recommended by experts of upbringing.

- Alice Miller, Psychologist and Author 

Alice Miller http://alice-miller.com/

from Center for Building a Culture of Empathy and Compassion  

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It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.
 

Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.
 

Nobody is born evil.

- Alice Miller