Drama of the Gifted Child

Some people move easily beyond a difficult childhood and just naturally make peace with it. Others will have to really explore what happened to them because they are haunted by the past. In her book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller puts it this way:

"Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history our childhood.... In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. We can, however, change ourselves…. We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of the past and are thus able to live with it."