Alice Miller Quotes

I grew up with an extremely abusive father. As a mother, I wanted to protect my own children from exposure to violence. When I found out one of my daughters was in an abusive relationship, it broke my heart. Finally, she left him ?- but only after his abuse started spreading to the children.

Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.

I called my mother up and I said, 'You know, I've been to the best doctors in the world and I've spent almost half a million dollars and they're telling me I have symptoms of a P.O.W. and all I did was grow up in your home.'

What distresses me at times is that I meet a lot of people in their 40's, 50's, 60's, who still say they're a victim of child abuse.

Nobody can tell me from some ivory tower that you take a kid, kick him in the rear end, and it doesn’t do him any good.

Those who are beaten become beaters.

Since I was probably eight years old, just about everyday, all the way until I was 14 or 15 years old, just about everyday my mom and my stepdad would roll around in the living room fighting.

Shame--what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

I'm a child who was abused. I know the difference. I clearly know the difference. The whipping for correction and then their child abuse.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

Wars shatter so many lives. I think especially of children robbed of their childhood.

Child abuse is still sanctioned — indeed, held in high regard — in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents.

If - and it can be in a movie or in a department store - I hear someone arguing with their child, I break down and cry. Because it reflects how I was treated when I was little.

My mother left me when I was 2 years old which is devestating to a child.

I wanted to write something from a child's viewpoint... Five of the characters I have played in movies have either been abused or became abusers, themselves, and I just kind of felt like there was a need.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

I don't believe in revenge. When people are bullies it's because of a deeper-rooted issue - either their family life is tough or they're being bullied by someone bigger than they are.

There is a psychic cost children bear when they grow up in fear.

It's a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences.