Thou Shalt Be Aware

The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self
Alice Miller
2001, New York: Basic Books

The terrorist, the mass murderer, the anorexic . . .

At the very beginning of human history, well before the Ten Commandments, we were presented with a supreme and destructive commandment. "Thou shalt not be mindful of the things done to you or the things you have done to others." For thousands of years, this "commandment of ignorance" has undermined our education and our childrearing, and has prevented us from telling good from evil. And although evil is learned and not innate, it is reproduced with each new generation. When we deny our childhood wounds, we inflict them on the next generation - unless and until we act in favor of knowledge. "Only by knowing the truth can we be set free."

Alice Miller continues to impress and inspire. The Truth Will Set You Free (published in Europe as Eve's Awakening) challenges us to reflect on our secrets and shortcomings. Miller exposes one of society's dirtiest secrets - that we are "emotionally blind" to abuses suffered by prisoners of childhood. Innocent children, no matter their country, class, or generation, are neglected, humiliated, and abused. Small children cannot survive such truths and can only repress them. But, because "the body never forgets," one's cauldron of pain seethes in the unconscious.

Fortunately for these young victims, psychological defenses offer partial protection against pain and anxiety. But repressing childhood traumas leaves mental barriers, an inner void, and the emotional blindness that prods them to harm themselves and others. These young victims become the suicides and psychopaths, the criminals and killers, the prostitutes and self-mutilators . . . as well as the everyday parents who abuse us "for our own good." All are trapped in unconscious compulsions to reenact their destructive childhood dramas on themselves and others.

Throughout this work, Miller questions the Bible. She notes that the Bible contains much that is fine and true, but much "poisonous pedagogy" as well. We must have the courage to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, to question that which is illogical. Is obedience a virtue? Is curiosity a sin? Is ignorance of good and evil an ideal state? Miller argues that it is our duty to overcome childhood wounds and acquire knowledge - by overcoming our defenses and our "emotional blindness" - so that we may come to know good from evil, and thereby become more fully responsible for our actions. We are also responsible for future generations, so we must love and protect all children, no matter the hostility, condemnation, or ostracism that we may encounter.

But how can we overcome our "emotional blindness"? Not through medication, not through meditation, not through relaxation training. Only by embarking on an indispensable journey of self-discovery, in which we confront our childhood traumas and uncover our early emotions. Telling the stories of our childhood allows us to break down walls and reclaim banished knowledge - but only in the presence of an enlightened witness. We benefit from simple regressions, and even from momentary glimpses, into our childhood experiences. A picture of our childhood gradually emerges. And when we discover personal truths, we regain our vitality, our sensitivity, our ability to love.

Many of these ideas, suggests Miller, are supported by recent brain research. There is new knowledge about psychobiological defenses and about the damage caused to individuals by stress, trauma, and neglect. She credits Joseph LeDoux, Debra Niehoff, Candace Pert, Daniel Schacter, and Robert Sapolsky for the discovery that early emotions leave "indelible traces" in the body.

But despite these scientific discoveries, we have yet to change the way we treat children. Miller is optimistic that legislation and parental education can and will reduce violence to children. This "principle of prevention" will cause our mentality, and our society, to change in stages. Such legislation has already advanced in Sweden, Germany, and South Africa.

Throughout this important new book, we are reminded of Miller's previous and seminal insights: that every criminal was humiliated, neglected, or abused in childhood; that only people beaten as children feel the compulsion to beat their own children; and that the world's worst tyrants had childhoods marked by extreme cruelty and humiliation. They had no empathic helpers, no enlightened witnesses. Dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, and Mao, for example, unconsciously reenacted their childhood situations on the political stage. They defended against their pain first through denial, and then through the idealization of their parents. They came to glorify violence and eventually took revenge on whole nations and peoples as a way of getting even for the cruelty they had once experienced. At one very important level, it is society's blindness to suppressed childhood pain and rage that makes war possible.

Also included in the current volume are brief critiques of the avoidance of childhood in six fields - medicine, psychotherapy, politics, the penal system, religion, and biography. Several new case studies (including the psychoanalyst Harry Guntrip) appear, and important insights are offered into corporal punishment, eating disorders, and circumcision. Finally, several important new books and web sites are recommended to readers.