Top Highlights

• Psychoanalyst Alice Miller has written that healing from a painful childhood begins with allowing yourself to express all the feelings and opinions that arose from years of abuse and control; in effect, speaking out after so many years of not being able to.
• For most of history, governments have been organized on a patriarchal, authoritarian model. Only recently has democracy, functioning on the consent of the governed, offered an alternative to patriarchal authoritarianism. The first year in which a majority of nations had democratic governments was 1992. Similarly, most families historically have bee...
• Control and trust are diametrically opposed and inextricably linked. We control to the extent that we mistrust the world. When we trust the world, we can feel safe enough to let go of much of our need to control. Controlling parents, by and large, do not trust. Parental overcontrol is nearly always a generations-old cycle, in place well before you ...
• Overcontrol, in contrast, throws young lives out of balance: Conditional love, disrespect, stifled speech, emotional intolerance, ridicule, dogmatic parenting, denial of an inner life, and social dysfunction take a cumulative toll.
• If emotions were banned, inflated, or feared, and your desires shamed or thwarted, you may have inherited distortions of feeling and wanting. You may regard emotions such as anger, fear, sadness—even joy—as life-threatening and overreact to them. You may be unable to tolerate a loved one’s strong feelings. You may deprive yourself of legitimate yea...