The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting
The Body Never Lies is a book for adults abused as children. Its central idea is the title: the body never lies. If you were abused, the legacy of that abuse is encoded in your body, and your body hasn’t forgotten it.
You can deny that it happened, you can repress your memories of it, but your body knows the truth, and it will carry that truth into everything you do.
Only when you acknowledge what happened and break free, will you be able 
to live fully. To break free you will need help—what Alice Miller calls an enlightened witness—to act as your guide.
Poisonous Pedagogy
Alice Miller rails against what she calls poisonous pedagogy. What she means by that is all the societal pressures which aid abusive parents and help them deny the destructiveness they have caused.
In particular she takes aim at the Fourth Commandment’s “Honor thy father and thy mother.” That exhortation gives cover to abusive parents. In The Body Never Lies Miller argues that it is healthier not to extend forgiveness to those who have ruined our adult lives by the cruelty they inflicted on us in childhood.
Alice Miller is a Swiss psychologist who was herself an abused child. This book draws on her own experience, on case histories from her practice, and on the biographies of celebrated writers.
From The Body Never Lies:
--“[The body] fights against lies with a tenacity and a shrewdness that are properly astounding. Moral and religious claims cannot deceive or confuse it.”
--“We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.”
--“Many therapists believe we can find peace through forgiveness, but this opinion is constantly refuted by the facts.”
--“When children are born, what they need most from their parents is love, by which I mean affection, attention, care, protection, kindness, and the willingness to communicate. If these needs are gratified, the bodies of those children will retain the good memory of such caring affection all their lives…”
