A review by ebonyutley
The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting by Alice Miller

4.0

Miller’s The Body Never Lies was much more accessible than Prisoners of Childhood. It’s still instructive about what makes a good therapist, but this time the advice pertains to individuals looking for a therapist as well as practitioners. Instructive is a good word for the text in general. Miller offers really simple instructions for those who were abused and humiliated in childhood: “stop loving and forgiving those who hurt you.” Super simple. Widly radical. She argues that the 4th commandment is insurance for old people that might have been necessary in biblical times but is no longer required. Forgiveness never healed anyone. It’s a moral imperative that we can choose not to follow. In fact, she urges us not to follow it to cure physical ailments. The body’s memory is perfect—a physical catalogue of all the mind has forgotten—and if we fail to listen to it then inexplicable, undiagnosable well as common ailments including cancer will rack our bodies until we address the childhood origins of pain. It’s not hatred that makes us ill but the repression of inaccessible, unexpressed emotions. In part one, she surveys the lives of famous people with tortured unresolved childhoods who died young. She writes about the morality that constrains us to physical llness in part two and ends with part three—a rather odd fictional, personal diary of an anorexic girl who refuses to eat because her parents form of nourishment is torture. Despite the shift in presentation for part three, this little book is a gem that dares you to listen, not to her, but to your body. Because the body, unlike the mind, and unlike people who failed to protect you—never lies.