Alice Miller Quotes

I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can't feel anymore.

Jayalalithaa was brutalised from the age of 16 in the cinema world. She therefore bears a psychotic pleasure in humiliating people as she was humiliated. She was deadened to normal human emotions.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

Physical wounds heal, but those on the soul are difficult to heal.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

The quivering flesh, though torture-torn, may live, but souls, once deeply wounded, heal no more.

If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

It is precisely because a child's feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.

Daughters could survive a powerful mother, but boys found it almost impossible. Such boys were often severely damaged and spent the rest of their lives running away from their mothers, or from anybody who remotely reminded them of their mothers; either that, or they became their mothers, in a desperate, misguided act of psychological self defence.

In a baby's first months, the earliest patterns of intimacy or distrust are forever grooved into his soul.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

Destructive criticism is the biggest single enemy of human potential. It is worse than cancer or heart disease. While those diseases can ultimately lead to the deterioration and death of an individual, destructive criticism kills the soul of the person but leaves the body walking around.

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.

Child abuse is one of those issues that's very difficult to talk about because it's surrounded by guilt and shame and so on, but us avoiding that issue doesn't help those kids in need out there who need support.

So I conjured one of the brokers and promised him my soul if he’d protect her. (Zephyra) You can’t do that. Only a demon can. (Stryker) You’re such a brainiac, baby. And to think, I thought I married you for those amazing abs. Who knew all that brainpower was buried under those bulging biceps? (Zephyra)

The maimed bodies aren't the worst. That's the easy way to hate war. The safe way. I - hate it just as much for the maimed souls that stay at home.

Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.

It takes a lot of energy to dull the soul and not hear its voice

We could hardly believe that after so many ordeals, after all the trials of modern skepticism, there was still so much left in our souls to destroy.

In all the languages in the world, there is the same proverb: "What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over." Well, I say that there isn't an ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

To get the best picture of a captured prisoner, you have to get him just as he is captured. The expression he wears then is lost forever... The human mechanism is remarkably recuperative. A half hour later, the expressions are gone, the faces have changed. The mother with the dead baby in her arms does not look griefstruck anymore, no matter what she feels.

I don't think I'm going to get so mature that I lose touch with the whatever wounded part of myself that feels the need to be funny. I'm already old enough that I realize that's not going to happen.