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Re:Transcending My Father's Abuse by crazygringo on Saturday May 06, 2023 @07:20PM (#35846268)
If this post resonates with you, there are two books I highly recommend, both by the renowned psychologist Alice Miller [1].

The first is For Your Own Good (1981), in which she describes the "poisonous pedagogy" of emotional and physical abuse passed down from generation to generation, and how we minimize and turn a blind eye to it because we want to follow the 4th commandment "Honor thy father and thy mother" (or in this case, a Confucian equivalent) -- at tremendous cost to ourselves, our own children, and society at large. It is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read.

The second is her more recent The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting (2005), which is more therapeutic and focused on how people's physical pain and sickness can dissipate when they are able to finally stand up for themselves and their own emotional needs, rather than continue to pretend their abusive parents were actually good.

Alice Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) is her best-known, but in my opinion, the above two books show her understanding evolving to become even more sophisticated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)

Re:Transcending My Father's Abuse by thenerdhead on Saturday May 06, 2023 @07:40PM (#35846416)
> I keep hoping for a future where my dad and I call every few days, and I can tell him about the decisions I’m navigating or the opinions I actually hold, without him yelling at me when I deviate from his expectations. I find myself dreaming that one day, my dad will call me and tell me that he connected with his own memories of his parents, and now fully understands the magnitude of the pain I endured. We’ve undergone similar pains, he’ll tell me. He got hit for wanting meat, and I got hit for not washing my hands. I’m sorry for recycling that pain.

The sad reality that Miller outlines in her most popular title is that you'll probably never receive this want even if you communicate it constantly. That book really hurt to read. But it is the truth.

Re:Transcending My Father's Abuse by browningstreet on Saturday May 06, 2023 @07:32PM (#35846369)
Also: Gabor Mate. He’s got videos, interviews, books. He focuses on addictions and childhood trauma, but his latest book extends his research to society in a broader level. His work is essential.
Re:Transcending My Father's Abuse by AdamCraven on Sunday May 07, 2023 @04:05AM (#35849023)
I would avoid Alice Miller, because she abused her own children[1]. “The body keeps score” I’d recommend instead

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/True-Drama-Gifted-Child-Phantom/dp/....

Re:Transcending My Father's Abuse by thenerdhead on Sunday May 07, 2023 @08:46AM (#35850913)
By that logic we should avoid most psychologists(think Anna Freud as a complete opposite here). These are all great books, but there’s something to learn from them all. If you read Miller’s most popular book and then her son’s, it will go to show you how difficult it is to break the generational cycle. Or simply put, how much people actually practice what they preach.
Re:Transcending My Father's Abuse by crazygringo on Sunday May 07, 2023 @10:04AM (#35851644)
Her son talks about the paradox of how she raised him abusively, and yet it was only through her books that he was able to heal himself many years later.

The timeline here is important -- her son was born in 1950, and her first book wasn't written until 29 years later.

I think it's much fairer to view her work as a heroic attempt to atone for her own sins. She was abused by her own parents, did the same to her children in turn, and then dedicated her entire professional life to figuring out how to break that cycle. It was too late for her own kids, but she was able to help others instead.

So it's unfair to judge her by saying she didn't practice what she preached. What she wrote about was sadly informed by her own personal experience.

The Body Keeps the Score (by Bessel van der Kolk) is another great book, but it's about trauma generally, and especially things like PTSD. It doesn't focus much on specifically parental abuse the way the blog post, and Alice Miller, do.