THE BODY NEVER LIES - THE LINGERING EFFECTS OF CRUEL PARENTING - ALICE MILLER, PH.D

                             BOOK REVIEW

BY SADIA WALI

 

World-renowned psychoanalyst, 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 gathered from her practice, as well as examining the biographical stories of other writers such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others, Miller exhibited how a child's emotional traumas, humiliation, and rage create physical and mental  disorders. While discussing the lives of these literary  celebrities, Miller explored  the traumas that haunted each author's childhood. She also connected the writers' painful childhoods with their age of maturity, causing severe mental disorders and sickness such as depression, anorexia, cancer, and even insanity.

  
Miller examined parental spanking to sexual abuse and emotional blackmail. According to the writer, the societal pressures  cause parents to adopt harsh and tyrannical  attitude with   children. To combat the devastating effects of such jarring, Miller recommended the therapy of "Enlightened Witness" to reaffirm the patient's repressed reactions to a forgotten childhood experience.

Miller also discussed  that religion can  help young  Individuals  to  become healthy and conscious adults. She urged society to realize that the Fourth Commandment -"Honor thy father and thy mother"- offers immunity to abusive parents. Indeed, she argued not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical child rearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives.

Finally, identifying the consequences, she stated that “Parents and guardians who abuse their children, both physically and mentally, leave them embarrassed and hurt. The inability of most children to properly express such feelings causes them to perpetuate the cycle by lashing out at their family, friends, and, above all their own children, who will inevitably do the same.’’

By reading this book, I found a calm and encouraging voice of Miller. The book provide us  an insight  to authoritarian parenting and its direct and indirect effect on child’s personality. The clinical therapy offered by the writer  boost up healing powers of the adult self and the body.

To know about negative temperaments and mood of your child and how to tackle depression, illness and other conflicts, parents are recommended to read this book and

analyse the factors which are causing physical problems in their children.

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