Sylvie Shene - Articles - The Drama of the Gifted Child

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ARTICLES: THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD

Because grandiosity is the counterpart of depression, the achievement of freedom from both forms of disturbance is hardly possible without deeply felt mourning about the situation of the former child. This ability to grieve---that is, to give up the illusion of his “happy” childhood, to feel and recognize the full extend of the hurt he has endured---can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on his Sisyphean task.

If a person is able, during this long process, to experience the reality that he was never loved as a child for what he was but was instead needed and exploited for his achievements, success, and good qualities---and that he sacrificed his childhood for this form of love---he will be very deeply shaken, but one day he will feel desire to end these efforts. He will discover in himself a need to live according to his true self and no longer be forced to earn “love” that always leaves him empty-handed, since it is given to this false self---something he has begun to identify and relinquish.

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality---the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the Kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening. We no longer need to keep it hidden behind the prison walls of illusion. We know who and what caused our pain, and it is exactly this knowledge that gives us freedom at last from the old pain.

A person who has matures through her own experience cannot be tricked with fascinating, incomprehensible words. Finally, a person who has consciously worked through the whole tragedy of her own fate will recognize another’s suffering more clearly, though the other may be trying to hide it. She will not be scornful of others feelings, whatever their nature, because she takes her own feelings seriously and knows how to work with them. She surely will not keep the vicious circle of contempt turning.

Contempt as a rule will cease with the beginning of mourning for the irreversible that cannot be changed, for contempt, too, has in its own way served to deny the reality of the past, It is, after all, less painful to think that the others do not understand because they are too stupid. Then one can make efforts to explain things to them, and the illusion of being understood (“if only I can express myself properly”) can be maintained. If, however, this effort is relaxed, one is forced to realize that understanding was not possible, since the repression of the parents’ own childhood needs made them blind to their children’s needs.

Even alert parents cannot always understand their children, but they will respect their children’s feelings even when they cannot understand them. Where there is no such respect, their children seek refuse from a painful truth in ideologies. Nationalism, racism, and fascism are in facts nothing other than ideological guises of the flight from painful, unconscious memories of endured contempt into the dangerous, destructive disrespect for human life, glorified as a political program. The formerly hidden cruelty that was exercised upon the powerless child now becomes only too apparent in the violence of such “political” groups. Its origins in childhood, in the total disregard of the former child, however, remain concealed or absolutely denied, not only by the members of these groups but by society as a whole.

From the book: “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self”

By Alice Miller

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