The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness

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 The 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 everywhere, and her book soon achieved cult status and became a backlist bestseller. 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's vivid true stories 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. This denial, necessary for the child's survival, leads to emotional blindness and finally 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, warns Miller — a message vitally important, especially given the increasing popularity of programs like Tough Love and of "child disciplinarians" like James Dobson and other religion-driven psychologists. 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.