Review of Alice Miller's THE BODY NEVER LIES (April 28, 2005)
by Norm Lee
In his 1941 book Generation of Vipers, Philip Wylie highlighted how slavishly our U.S. culture worships mothers and motherhood. He scorned how soldiers spelled out "MOM" on parade grounds, and added the term "momism" to our language. The book enraged many, but shook awake far too few. Today, Alice Miller would show us, in detail, how those soldiers – and most of the rest of us – were, and still are, craving the approval, affection and love that was denied us by our parents during childhood. We are still caught in the illusion that we can somehow win and/or earn the love that was so long withheld. Too many gave punishment and called it love.
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 we do, we will continue to feel, think and behave in ways similar to the little children we once were. Who has grown up, really? As children were we accepted and loved for who we were, or did our parents repeatedly punish us in attempts to force us into the imaginary mold they had prepared for us? The wanted us to be what they thought 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 as children, we suppressed and sacrificed our true and good authentic selves so we could win the attention and affection upon which our emotional survival depended.
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 live and breathe, the fear of parental rejection/punishment lurks within. Before healing can take place, that fear has to be brought to conscious awareness and examined.
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 we make others pay as well. Those others are far too 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 (For Your Own Good) 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 unspeakable 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 Superdaddy who, if given the love demanded, will reward us 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 our childhood.
Dr. Miller wants the reader to understand and accept that parents who abused us, however well-intentioned, 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, accepts only the facts. Higher morality is inherent not in the mind, but in our bodies. Alice 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 – the illusion &ndash that somehow, sometime, we will finally bask in the love that was so long ago denied us.
Reading Alice Miller 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 treatment you suffered at the hands of your parents. And I'm asking you - urging you, challenging you - to come out of that closet and face up to it."
In the valley where I live, the #1 fear, at whatever age, is parental punishment. And among adults, its primary defense is Denial. Behind that denial of childhood mistreatment lies the fear of punishment for denying it. 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 can see it everywhere: the suffering in the bodies and faces and behavior of strangers and of those dear to us. But we must begin with ourselves, by bravely confronting the punishing parent within.
