April 27, 2012
Please know that these blogs are but brief looks at material
that is covered in numerous books and articles. My intent here is to just keep
pointing us all in directions that will increase our self-understanding and
potential for healthy changes in our lives. I will be sharing the names of
resources as we go along for you to explore further just as I am doing.
I have known of the work of Alice Miller,
particularly her book The Drama of the
Gifted Child, for the past 20 years, and yet not until this past year did I
stop and intentionally study her work. I knew that therapists working with the
inner child model quoted her and had built some of their work from hers. As I
continued to write about codependency, I knew it was important for me to keep
reading and learning. Alice Miller is one of the resources I studied, and I was
thrilled to learn what she says and how it applies to codependency.
Alice Miller never uses the word “codependent,” but the
“gifted child”‑ the child who is sensitive, intelligent, alert, and attentive -
shares many characteristics with the codependent. But first a bit more
background:
Alice Miller was a psychoanalyst who developed her material
from both her professional and personal understandings. The Drama of the Gifted Child was first published in German in 1979
under the title Prisoners of Childhood. It
was published in English in 1981 as The
Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. This subtitle is
so powerful and telling as far as I am concerned. Many of us now know that
recovery from codependency is in fact the finding and developing of our True
Self.
Miller maintains that in very early childhood some parts of
our true self were split-off from us as a result of the way we were treated by
our primary caretaker. Our feelings and needs were not attuned to and responded
to by that caretaker. We were not mirrored and echoed by them. Instead, we
learned to attune to the feelings and needs of our primary caretaker and to try
to respond to what we believed they needed and wanted from us. Those needs of
the primary caretaker for our mirroring
of them were at an unconscious level
within them and likely to have come from the parenting they received.
As a result of these experiences, we developed a strong
capacity to attune to the feelings and needs of others and to respond to those
feelings and needs as best we can. In doing this, we disconnected from our own
feelings and needs. I see this as the very early seeds of focusing on the
external and not our internal. And because we were not mirrored by our primary
caretaker, we are unable to see and know our self. We thus developed a false sense of self vs. a true sense of
who we are and how to respond to both our self and others in healthy ways.
Ways to help our selves with this false self vs. true self will follow in later blogs.