The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition

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Miller's model of family relation ships has become a landmark for everyone from child-abuse professionals to the self-helping public.

Miller observes that it is those parents who felt like they had to put away their own authentic selves to meet their parents’ needs that pass on this pattern to their children. My dad went to college and medical school during this time and was drafted the day after he finished his medical residency at Boston General Hospital.That is, to avoid projecting my own desires and fantasies and personal conception of success onto them and to allow them to flourish as their own person.

This might require therapy and mourning your lost self, but the positive effects are worth the effort. These kids, now grown up, relive their childhood nightmares of being put in a spiritual coffin by their controlling guardians. In becoming her parents’ ideal child, she locks away her true feelings in a kind of “glass cellar,” the key to which is thrown away.Stories of which I have little to no recollection but have been told about seemed to come back with stark clarity as the emotions I had felt were accessed. The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality--the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.