The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller

[rachelmanija]

Summary: Lots of parents were the victims of child abuse and parents who crushed and denied their feelings; they then abuse, or deny and crush the feelings of their own children. It takes lots of therapy to overcome this. Many patients come in claiming that their childhoods were just fine, but after a bunch of sessions, they realize that actually,

Comments

[mrissa]

Is there a reason she uses "gifted child" when it's often used to mean something completely different? By this I mean, do you think it's a good reason?

[rachelmanija]

Not in my opinion. She means that we're all born with natural strengths and abilities (gifts) which are crushed by society/our parents, so it's not totally out of left field. But given that virtually everyone else uses "gifted" to mean "significantly above-average ability in some area," it seems unnecessarily misleading.

[lady_ganesh]

I seriously always thought this was about gifted children until reading this.

[swan_tower]

“Stop insisting that people are in denial just because they aren’t saying what you think is the truth.”

This one drives me batshit. It turns the entire thing into a game rigged for the therapist to win. Heads, she wins; tails, you lose.

[rachelmanija]

It's the number one symptom of bad therapy, in my opinion.

[swan_tower]

I also find myself dubious of any psychological theory in general that says "aha, see, this minor trauma in childhood is the reason you have problems X, Y, and Z later on." I have to believe the human psyche is more resilient than that: we have more than a hundred thousand years behind us as anatomically modern Homo sapiens, and most of those years did not feature parenting of an approved modern sort. If our minds and personalities were really so fragile as some psychologists/psychiatrists/therapists seem to think, our species would have collapsed millennia ago.

(Example: "Your mother was insufficiently warm and loving toward you; that's why you're schizophrenic." Um. So 99% of all humans ever were schizophrenic, before we reached our modern, enlightened paradise? I don't think so

[rachelmanija]

Wait till I start writing up my class in narrative therapy. It's premised on these two ideas:

1. People are naturally resilient and resourceful. The purpose of therapy is to help them discover, appreciate, build up, and make the best use of their already-existing strengths.

2. The client is the expert on their own experiences, inner state, and desires. The therapist is a helper, not an authority.

[tool_of_satan]

Is there any parent, anywhere, who hasn't "crushed and denied" their children's feelings at some point, according to her definition? Because if not (and based on your description I don't see how anyone could live up to her parenting standards), then EVERYONE needs therapy.

[rachelmanija]

But everyone DOES need therapy. ;)

I think some parents genuinely do consistently crush and deny their children's feelings, and it really does cause problems down the road. The trouble is, Miller talks about emotional abuse, physical abuse, non-abusive but kind of crappy parenting, and normal (imperfect) parenting as if it's all the same thing.

[tool_of_satan]

Oh, there are definitely plenty of awful parents out there, and I'm sure a lot of their children would benefit from therapy. But as you say, there are lots of different things parents do that a child might not like, and lumping them all together is problematic: treating being denied ice cream as if it were emotional abuse doesn't strike me as helpful, particularly to people who suffered genuine emotional abuse as children.

[asakiyume]

Including some things a parent may do that a child may not like that may be beneficial to the child--things like taking the child to a doctor when she's doubled over in pain, even though she doesn't want to get in the car and go for a drive, or not letting her taste antifreeze, even though she wants to, and making her put back the three boxes of Frosted Sugar Bombs that she put in the shopping cart.

[tavella]

Many patients come in claiming that their childhoods were just fine, but after a bunch of sessions, they realize that actually, their childhood feelings were denied and crushed.

Ahahaha. Yeah, this is pretty much iatrogenic. Everyone has moments in their childhood where their parents were unkind to them (at least in their opinion.) After weeks of someone going "but obviously your parents were awful to you! tell me about it!" you will indeed be convinced that you were the most put-upon child ever.

[naomikritzer]

On a parenting board I used to lurk on, I ran into someone (childless, IIRC) who insisted that she remembered the emotional agony of being left alone to cry as an infant and it had SCARRED HER IRREPARABLY. We're not talking about catastrophic neglect -- we're talking about a parent who would stick her in the crib to go to sleep and walk away.

My impression of this woman from her online posts was that she had some sort of personality disorder, and a psychologist willing to work with the theory that EVERYTHING IS CAUSED BY EARLY TRAUMA and the best way to cure a patient is to spend lots and lots of time having them analyze how it all boils down to their parents' imperfections.