picture in my mind

Was cleaning up my hard drive and found my collection of notes
from The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller.

Children who are intelligent, alert, attentive, sensitive, and completely attuned to the mother's well-being are entirely at her disposal. Transparent, clear, and reliable, they are easy to manipulate as long as their true self (their emotional world) remains in the cellar of the glass house in which they have to live -- sometimes until puberty or until they come to therapy, and very often until they have become parents themselves.


I keep telling my friends, sometimes offending them I'm sure, that parents should stop attempting to fix their children and fix themselves. I grow increasingly certain of this. Happy parents make happy children. Stressed out, anxious parents create distraught children. The most powerful teacher is the role model. So, you can say one million things to your children -- but if you don't embody it, forget it. Your children will learn to be whatever you are.

And these incredibly intelligent and sensitive children? The perfect children you have that you show off to everybody, on whom all your hope resides? It breaks my heart. They are truly the easiest canvases on which to project your inadequacies as an adult. They will be whatever the parent unconsciously wishes them to be; they are so smart they become what you need! And if they don't ever meet an adult who truly pays attention to them, they grow up also never paying attention to themselves, and feel disconnected from their real selves.

You know how they say the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother? True, I think, because if you have an insecure and emotionally-distraught woman, she will project all her needs and lack onto her poor children, and the smartest ones will carry the heaviest burden. Unless you have a strong woman who stands up for herself and for her children. I'm thinking of Trevor Noah's mother who he depicted in his autobiography Born A Crime; that lady was jaw-dropping, haha. She made Trevor and her jump out of a moving vehicle to save themselves, all that told in hilariously comedic prose. She also left her useless second husband when it came down to it. Women who continuously allow themselves to suffer in silence do a disservice to their children. You think your children can't tell how miserable you are? It comes from you in waves. And it creates all sorts of complexes in their young minds.

It's hard to be a parent, I get it. (Or maybe I don't since I'm not one, but I can appreciate it at least.) But I'm just saying, human beings should work on being good human beings.
Work on yourselves.
Then maybe... you'll be a better spouse, a better friend, a better parent.

... a mother can react empathically only to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood;

when she denies the vicissitudes of her early life, she wears invisible chains.