Olivia

“Depression as Denial of the Self Depression consists of a denial of one’s own emotional reactions. This denial begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood and indicates a very early injury. There are many children who have not been free, right from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger—and, of course, enjoyment of their own bodies.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.”
― Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child

“People who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but who also therefore had to solve their own problems alone. These people, who give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. In their presence one feels one cannot be recognized as a person with problems just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom he always had to be strong.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“After all, it is quite normal for us to owe a debt of gratitude to our parents and grandparents (or the people standing in for them), even if the treatment we experienced at their hands was sheer unadulterated torture. This is an integral part of morality, as we understand it. But it is a species of morality that consigns our genuine feelings and our own personal truth to an unmarked grave.”
― Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting