The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting

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Like in an invisible jail, the fourth commandment confines many people into untruthful relationships with their parents, from which they often suffer. Abused and disrespected in childhood, they strive, still during their adult lives, to reach and even please cruel parents, who do not wish to understand and support them, who do not care about their well-being.

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Miller also discusses how institutionalized religion itself can contribute to the crushing guilt that prevents us from being healthy and conscious adults. She urges society to realize that the Fourth Commandment -“Honor thy father and thy mother”- offers immunity to abusive parents. Indeed, she argues, it is healthier not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives. If God had understood how Moses felt about his abandonment, perhaps parents would have a duty to be ‘enlightened witnesses’ for their children. Perhaps if God had recognized that God had a childhood, and perhaps if God had created Adam and Eve as children instead of adults, if God set their goal as the expression of self-knowledge and watched their progress, instead of forbidding them knowledge, perhaps the Fourth Commandment passed to Moses would have read:

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World-renowned therapist Alice Miller has devoted a lifetime to studying the cruelties inflicted on children. In The Body Never Lies Miller goes further, investigating the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the adult body. Using numerous case histories gleaned from her practice, as well as examining the biographical stories of celebrated writers such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others, Mil1er shows how a child’s emotional traumas, repressed humiliation, and bottled rage can manifest themselves as serious adult health problems. In discussing the lives of these literary giants, Miller explores the known or, in some cases, unknown traumas that haunted each author’s childhood. More important, Miller connects the writers’ painful childhoods with their later afflictions, which included depression, anorexia, cancer, and even insanity. This is why “parents” as an institution still enjoy total immunity. If that changes one day (as this book postulates), then we will be in a position to feel what our parents’ cruelties have done to us. We will have a better understanding of the signals emitted by our bodies and we can live in peace with them, not as the beloved children we never were and can never become, but as open-minded, aware, and perhaps loving adults who no longer have to fear our own biographies because we know all about them.

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During this time, both sisters said they took the opportunity to slow down and recollect themselves with other hobbies such as cooking, Twitch streaming and even building a home studio. After the publication of the original German version of The Body Never Lies in March 2004, many readers wrote to me saying how relieved they were that they no longer had to feign feelings they did not really have, or to deny feelings that kept on reasserting themselves. But in other responses, notably in the press, I have found indications of a fundamental misunderstanding that I myself may have contributed to by using the word “mistreatment” in a much broader sense than is usually the case. Techniques of converting “negative” emotions into “positive” emotions will fail. Why? Because these manipulations reinforce denial, rather than leading to honest confrontations with one’s authentic emotions. And forgiveness, Miller reminds us, has never had a healing effect. Preaching forgiveness is hypocritical, futile, and actively harmful. Harmful because the body doesn’t understand moral precepts. One may rightly forgive their parents if they realize what they’ve done, though, if they apologize for the pain they’ve caused.

My decision to call these invisible injuries “mis-treatment” sometimes arouses resistance and indignant protest. I find this attitude easy to understand because it is one that I shared for a very long time. Earlier, if someone had suggested that I had been cruelly treated as a child, I would have roundly denied the “insinuation”. But today I know quite definitely that in my childhood I was indeed exposed to mental cruelty for many years. My dreams, my painting, and not least the messages of my own body have told me this, but as an adult I refused to accept the fact for a very long time. Like many other people I thought: ” Me? I was never beaten. The few slaps I got were nothing special. And my mother took so much trouble with me.” (In my book the reader will find similar statements by others). Accordingly clients aware at the outset of therapy that they were severely injured by their parents and able to take this fact seriously are very unusual indeed. People whose parents took their children’s feelings seriously from the beginning do not have to make such immense efforts at a later stage to take a serious view of their lives and their sufferings. In the majority of cases, however, the early mechanism remains active: these people obstinately trivialize their own sufferings, even if they are therapists themselves. They remain true to the spirit of Poisonous Pedagogy and to the dictates of the society they live in. But frequently they are very remote from their own selves. I believe that it is the goal of effective therapy to diminish such self-distance.

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A woman therapist who read my last book very thoroughly and understood what it has to say told me that she has now taken a more forthright line in indicating to her clients the injuries inflicted on them by their parents. In almost all cases their response has been to resist the very idea. She asked me whether the Fourth Commandment is an adequate explanation of this obstinate attachment to their idealized parents. As long as they are under the spell of this commandment, they also often suffer in similar ways in other close relationships, denying their truth and reality like they had to as children with their parents. But there is a powerful witness to the suffering we endure through hypocritical, painful relationships—our body. Although we are trained to follow those moralistic expectations to honor our parents, no matter how they have treated us as children or treat us now as adults—the body refuses to do so. Again and again, it tries to communicate the tragic experiences that we carry hidden inside, in the unconscious. Alice Miller invites us to listen to and understand our bodies and ourselves with love by moving away from the destructive commandment that we must honor those who cause us harm and hurt us. Tragically, much of psychology is comprised of nonsense and noise…rats, statistics, medications. So we are fortunate to receive the rare and exceptional work of Alice Miller. Her most recent volume, The Body Never Lies, continues one of psychology’s most important collections. In my terminology, emotion is a more or less unconscious, but at the same time vitally important physical response to internal or external events—such things as fear of thunderstorms, rage at having been deceived, or the pleasure that results from a present we really desire. By contrast, the word “feeling” designates a conscious perception of an emotion. Emotional blindness, then, is usually a (self-) destructive luxury that we indulge in at our cost. MY”Our daily responses to the world may be divided into the physical and emotional, yet these two categories are not autonomous. Our health is frequently damaged by long repressed feelings of emotional trauma, anger about being spanked or otherwise, these are hurts that we may have never consciously processed because to do so might break social mores. Over the decades since childhood, feelings of humiliation, rage, and powerlessness can fester if we insist on remembering a happy upbringing; untreated, these feelings will eventually manifest themselves in fatal illness. Such was the case, Miller shows, with such filially pious and brilliant authors as Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. Rimbaud’s suffering under a malevolent and unsupportive mother drove him to the drug addiction, restless traveling, and bottomless self-loathing that finally caused him to give up writing and turn to business; he died at thirty-seven of cancer. Wolf committed suicide after accepting that her step-brothers’ childhood molestation of her was her fault — the result of her own sexual fantasies according to Freudian theory. A suffocating mother kept Proust from publishing his masterwork In Search of Lost Time until after her death, for fear its incisive indictment of bourgeois values would offend her; an asthma victim since childhood, he died just two months after its publication. When it comes to songwriting and overall production, Krewella sits at the very top of the food chain. With ten songs, including the three featured singles, “Never Been Hurt” with BEAUZ, “No Control” with MADGRRL, and “I’m Just A Monster Underneath, My Darling,”the album is some of the best work the two Yousaf sisters have ever released. individuals who are prepared unflinchingly to confront the truth about their childhood and to see their parents in a realistic light. Unfortunately, it is very often the case that therapeutic success can be seriously endangered if therapy (as frequently happens) is subjected to the dictates of conventional morality, thus making it impossible for adult clients to free themselves of the compulsive persuasion that they owe their parents love and gratitude. The authentic feelings stored in the body remain untapped, and the price the clients have to pay for this is the unremitting persistence of the severe symptoms affecting them. I assume that readers who have themselves undergone a number of unsuccessful therapies will readily recognize their plight in this problem. In”