Of Moms and Moses A Review of Alice Miller's book, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting
For I would prefer to have
these [asthma] attacks and please you,
rather than displease you and not have them.
- Marcel Proust, in a letter to his mother
In his 1941 book "Generation of
Vipers", Philip Wylie highlighted how slavishly this culture
worships motherhood, scorned how soldiers spelled out
"MOM" on parade grounds, and coined the term
"momism". The book enraged many, but shook too few
awake. Today, Alice Miller would show us, in detail, how those
soldiers - and most of the rest of us - were, and are still
craving the approval, affection and love denied us by our parents
in our childhood. We are still caught in the illusion that we can
somehow win and/or earn the love from the source that so long
withheld it from us.
We have to break free of our (internalized) parents' grip on us,
that of the biblical injunction, "Honor (obey, worship,) thy
father and thy mother." Until then we, in a sense, feel and
behave and think like the little children we once were; we cannot
grow up. Worse, because as children we weren't accepted and loved
for who we were, parents repeatedly punished us in attempts to
force us into the imaginary mold they had prepared for us, i.e.,
what a child should be. Dr. Miller's message is that our bodies
bear a detailed record of every childhood hurt and humiliation
inflicted, every spank and slap, insult and indignity. And until
or if those internal, psychic wounds remain unhealed, we can
expect to continue to pay the terrible price in physical
illnesses. Powerless to do otherwise, we suppressed our true and
good authentic selves to win the love our emotional survival
depended on.
Dr. Miller writes with astonishing and penetrating truth about the
connections between childhood suffering at the hands of parents,
and the physical consequences of obedience to the Fourth
Commandment. The Biblical law, "Honor thy father and thy
mother" is here challenged as the source of widespread - even
universal - life-long suffering. As children we attempted to free
ourselves from our feelings of fear, insecurity and confusion thru
repression and dissociation/self-alienation. Whatever the cost
(abandonment of our true selves), we persisted in loving and
trusting our parents (we hardly had a choice) and strived to earn
their approval, (and (thus) to please the Greater Parent in the
Sky.)
Today, what stands between our bodies and the healing of those
injuries is the hold the Fourth Commandment has on our minds. As
we lie and breathe, the fear of parental rejection/punishment
lurks within that fear. It has to be brought to consciousness and
examined before healing can take place. We walk carrying a sack
full of personal history, the burden of wounds inflicted by all
the punishment and indignities that have ever happened to us.
Until we heal those internal wounds, we daily pay a terrible price
in suffering, much of it physical illness, and make others pay as
well. Those others are most often our own children. The claim so
often heard, "I got spanked and I turned out OK," cannot
be upheld when it is understood how the denial of physical and
emotional injuries are connected to present illnesses.
There are three sections to this book: first: illustrations from
the lives of famous literary people; second, efforts made at
overcoming traditional morality, i.e., effects of 4th Commandment;
and third, an in-depth case study of truth suppression as
manifested in anorexia. Alice Miller has expounded at length in
earlier books about dictatorial megalomaniacs like Hitler and
Stalin who directed their hate and violence toward others. In this
book she shows how we direct ours toward ourselves. Examples are
taken from the biographies of well-known people: Franz Kafka,
Dostoevsky, Checkhov, Schiller, Rimbaud, Proust, Virginia Wolfe,
James Joyce, et. al. Shown are the efforts of their respective
parents to make them over into the child they wanted, and the
consequences in the victims' lifelong illnesses and early deaths.
Dr. Miller repeatedly emphasizes the tragic effects, in the form
of physical ailments, of the body's life-long yearning for
parental love and affection. She touches on the way this
suppression is expressed in religion: the command to love God, on
pain of punishment when we fail to do so; the absurdity of
inventing a parent-like creator, perfect and omnipotent, who
craves our love. It is an odd god, an immensely dependent god, a
Big Daddy who, if given the love demanded, will reward with an
eternity in blissful heaven. (And the teenage suicide bombers of
the Middle East are promised the bonus of 72 virgins to sweeten
the deal.) Inasmuch as the Great Father is not loved, even
worshipped, the alternative is agonizing punishment from now to
the "end" of eternity.
We have to liberate ourselves from the propaganda imposed on us -
and enforced on us on pain of punishment - by conventional
morality. This book calls for a higher morality, as it applies to
parenthood. We cannot truly love our parents, she asserts, until
we are liberated from the infantile attachment, the idolatry, that
trapped us in childhood.
Dr. Miller wants the reader to understand and accept that parents
who abused us do not deserve our love and honor, regardless of a
Moses-imposed commandment to do so. As we all must know, love is
one thing that cannot be enforced. Like Sgt. Joe Friday, the body,
in its wisdom, rejects illusions. It accepts only the facts, as
higher morality is inherent not in the mind, but in our bodies.
She takes to task all those friends and relatives and preachers
and therapists who say, "Forgive your mother, forgive your
father; they did the best they knew how. She changed your diapers,
he sacrificed for you, and above all they loved you." Miller
will not hear it: forgiveness is a crock and a trap, laid to
continue the dependency, and preserve the hope, that somehow,
sometime, we will finally bask in the love that was so long ago
denied us. Reading Alice is like hearing someone whisper, "I
know the secret you are hiding in your past, the feelings of hurt
and fright and shame and humiliation at the abusive treatment you
suffered at the hands of your parents. And I'm asking you - urging
you, challenging you - to come out of that dark closet and face up
to it."
In the valley where I live, the #1 fear at whatever age is
parental punishment. And among adults, it's primary defense is
Denial. Behind the denial of childhood mistreatment lies the fear
of punishment, therefore acknowledgement or recognition of it in
adulthood can approach terror. But the price for denial is paid in
physical as well as mental illness. When aware of it we see it
everywhere: the suffering in the bodies and minds of strangers and
of those dear to us. But we must begin with ourselves, confronting
the punishing parent within.
The Body Never Lies: The Lingering
Effects of Cruel Parenting