My therapeutic journey began in 1980 in Chicago, when I read Alice Miller’s book “For Your Own Good.” As I read it, I felt as if something that I had always known deep inside of me could connect with my conscious mind. Ever since, my inner child experienced and saw Alice Miller as being on her side, and I felt that she was on my side in searching for and connecting with my true self.
Eventually, we became friends. I followed her advice to work with a psychoanalyst and later a form of written therapy in four steps, which she had promoted — until a dream made clear that these forms of therapy were dead ends.
I owe the fact that I was able to grow and heal above all to my work with IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy and its developer Dick Schwartz, and I continue to work with this therapy to this day.
IFS turned out to be immensely helpful for me to understand and help the dissociation I suffered from: the desperate fight of my parts — our split-off beliefs and feelings — for my survival under traumatic circumstances. IFS is based on the assumption that we all have a true Self inside, which our parts work hard to protect. This basic principle has given me my freedom, trust in my Self, and the ability to live from Self-leadership — values and intents that, long ago, I had only vaguely dreamed of.
My book “Screams from Childhood” was created during those first years of therapy work with Dick Schwartz, when also this website began in 2004. For three years, from about 2005 until, 2008, I worked with and for Alice Miller and her website, accompanied by daily phone calls. The shocking public end of our friendship threw me back into anxiety and sleeplessness, into despair, and I am still deeply grateful that I could resume my work with Dick Schwartz.
In 2012, Alice Miller’s son Martin Miller contacted me, two years after his mother had died. He shared how horribly he had suffered because of her completely denied dissociation. Alice Miller had concealed and suppressed her traumatic experiences as a Jewish teenager under Nazi terror in Poland. In her books, she only wrote about and acknowledged childhood traumas.
Martin wrote a book about his mother: “The True Drama of the Gifted Child,” which is dedicated to the uncovering of the devastating effects of war and persecution traumas, and which I translated into English. Until my contact with Martin, I had been at a complete loss to come to terms with the abrupt betrayal of Alice Miller. Martin’s insights made it possible for me to realize how deeply dissociated Alice Miller was, and how misleading her claim is that only childhood traumas affect us. It is reminiscent for me to Freud’s invention of the Oedipus complex to deny sexual abuse.
On my website, the voice and rebellion of the child lives in the “Screams from Childhood” and other articles. I share about my therapeutic journey in other articles, most importantly in “Escape from the Fog of Admiration.”
Born in 1950, after World War II, I share about the impact of my family history in the essay “Facing a Wall of Silence,” which was published in the book “Second Generation Voices.”
– Barbara Rogers