The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self | 
|  | | | Title: | The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self | | Author: | Alice Miller
Andrew Jenkins | | Publisher: | Basic Books | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | December, 2002 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0465045855 / 9780465045853 | | List Price: | $14.00 | | You Save: | $2.80 | | Amazon Price: | $11.20 | |
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Product Description
More than twenty years ago, a little-known Swiss psychoanalyst wrote a book that changed the way many people viewed themselves and their world. In simple but powerful prose, the deeply moving Drama of the Gifted Child showed how parents unconsciously form and deform the emotional lives of their children. Alice Miller's stories about the roots of suffering in childhood resonated with readers, and her book soon became a backlist best seller.In The Truth Will Set You Free Miller returns to the intensely personal tone and themes of her best-loved work. Only by embracing the truth of our past histories can any of us hope to be free of pain in the present, she argues. Miller uses vivid true stories to reveal the perils of early-childhood mistreatment and the dangers of mindless obedience to parental will. Drawing on the latest research on brain development, she shows how spanking and humiliation produce dangerous levels of denial, which leads in turn to emotional blindness and to mental barriers that cut off awareness and the ability to learn new ways of acting. If this cycle repeats itself, the grown child will perpetrate the same abuse on later generations--a message vitally important, especially given the increasing popularity of programs like Tough Love and of "child disciplinarians" like James Dobson. The Truth Will Set You Free will provoke and inform all readers who want to know Alice Miller's latest thinking on this important subject.
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Customer Reviews:
• No Real Help For Recovering People 27 March, 2008
I thought this book of course does a good job explaining Alice Miller's position that abuse has harmful lasting effects. But the title of this book led me to believe it had helpful ideas for recovering people. It doesn't. It just explains her position, and when you are disability and haven't worked in a few years and you are just trying to come to terms with all that's happened to you and you spend money to buy a book with the title that it will help you recover and it doesn't have any helpful ideas then you might feel pretty ripped off, which is what I Think about this book.
I see kids at church where their parents don't discipline them, and they act up and do things that I never would have even thought about doing as a child. I would have had the living daylights beaten out of me, and I would have suffered extensively. I never would have dreamed of it.
I do see that the abuse has had long lasting effects in my life, and I"m seeking to recover, but this book wasn't very helpful.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A7SQXASFDQ3N1
• Be Careful What You Ask For 07 August, 2007
Miller's main premise is that God set up mankind for the fall. The truth is that God allowed the tree of knowledge of good and evil to co-exist next to the Tree of Life. Man was given a choice. Choose your own way or choose life. Man has been paying for its choice ever since....
The same goes for discipline. Miller wants to give reason to just let children do what they want to. Go ahead and do that if you want, but I am writing to warn that this thinking is destructive to the soul. Of course we have choices, but there are good choices and bad choices. As parents, it is up to us to help our children make good choices. When there are bad choices, discipline is in order. Use your best judgement what type of discipline in necessary in that situation.
Children will grow into adults and make their own decisions without our intereference eventually anyway. Hopefully by good parenting, they will learn that there are consequences to their actions. You will not be responsible to administer correction any longer, but their future spouses will, the legal system, their employers, their friends, people on the road driving next to them. Hopefully they will make good choices.
Peace. Read something like Dobson, it will help you.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2YPZ5QWGWZI06
• Great Focus On Underlying Causes, But Not As Practical As I Hoped. 22 July, 2007
Alice Miller goes into a facinating and undoubtably true acount on how we are often are own worst enemy. We often poison ourselves with comfortable lies that end up causing more damage than we realize both spiritually and physically.
The Truth will Set you Free, is a wonderful title for the books content. As someone who has been meditating almost daily for the past several years I have grown to develop an awareness of myself that I did not have in earlier years. So I put Alice Miller to the test. After a meditation session I stayed sitting and relaxed and began to think Aloud the following statements pausing for 3 minutes between each one. 1- He was the best father in the world and he loved me very much growing up. 2- My father never loved me and wouldn't have cared if I died. 3- Though he did care and provide, my father was a pathetic man who loved himself much more than he ever loved me. When I said the first two statements, I felt an inner tension in my gut and upper spine. When I claimed the last one the tension released completely. That's because the last statement was the true one, regardless of how hard it might be to admit. But such tension is subtle and not detectable by most people at first. Alice Miller states that we often take the lies told to us by society and family and embody them, but our bodies/subconscious CANNOT be lied to. And our bodies carry around the toxic lie until finally we find ourselves getting sick. Facing truth may hard for your mind to bear initially, but it's the only thing that alleviates pain in the soul and body in the long run. The only problem I have with this book it offers almost no practical guideline as to what someone can DO to get to the truth. It mentions therapy briefly. Meditation I know works too, but it took me a long time before I grew to an awareness of subtle little shifts in emotion and the body like what I experienced in the 'experiment.' The type of people who would buy this book most likely have already faced their emotional blindness on some level and are looking to learn ways to enhance that- and that practicality is what this book is missing. Still a fascinating and potentially enlightening read.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A11C08FBE0Q9VI
• This Book Will Break Down Your Internal Walls Of Silence 03 January, 2007
I read this book carefully & slowly. I will not be the same again, in that I will no longer go through life, with my eyes closed. Emotionally, this book has freed me to a great extent. I believe then, that it can do so for anyone who is honest & open.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1PY7EGMQ1TS9E
• A Lack Of Substance 23 February, 2008
It has been some time since I had originally read this book, but in coming back and further reflecting upon it, I feel a need to distance myself further from it. There are of course the basic, standard, good premises: bad parenting is bad and hurts children. Yet, when you get depth little more so than that, the book is sorely simplistic. Admonitions to just "love yourself" might just not be all that is needed for a true, curative psychotherapeutic process. As a licensed psychologist, and to plain and simple just be quite the bit more pragmatic, a person, breathing, I find much more depth in works such as "On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation: Infantile Psychosis," by Margaret S. Mahler and Manuel Furer and "Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects" by Harold F. Searles, the former showing you much more intently the inner workings of the mind of an infant or a young child in distress, with the latter showing what it is to do true psychotherapeutic work, that is, not just theory-based, but if one examines what Dr. Searles has to say, one can also see that he is giving of himself most immensely. Now, again, as a psychologist, and as a human being, more so, and more so I live, learn and thrive, I have found it most remarkable that other persons in the psychological and psychiatric professions not just only take umbrage (offense or annoyance) with my views, such that this work of Ms. Miller is simplistic and fails to strive at finding core bases for the transformation of the human psyche or better yet the amelioration of psychiatric symptomatology, better yet the working through of intrapsychic conflict, but also that they resort to plain out-and-out mockery and attempts at denigration. Maybe Ms. Miller did hit the nail on the head in noting that these unresolved conflicts lie within each of us and manifest in manifold manner; yet, Freud did say that, too. Either way, the book lacks any significant element of in-depth insight, without which change--or psychic restructuralization--is just plain not possible. And, if you get into the vanity inherent in mockery, well, it's a long characterological road on back then.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AIJ96GI9RSKGA
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