Nivine Khallaf

“I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.”
― Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child

“Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.”
― Alice Miller

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very young age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. (...) But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinently shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.”
― Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting