Beyond Conditional Love

Healing Childhood Maltreatment by Breaking Through the Wall of Ignorance

“We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”—Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning¹

Every day, the news shows us hotbeds of violence in the world. We are powerless against war, but according to psychoanalyst Alice Miller the roots of violence are not unknown. People only learn to pass on hate and violence to others when they have experienced those things as victims first, especially as a child. Maltreated children learn that they must suppress their true feelings of anger and pain, because under no condition may they lose their parent’s love. Subsequently, they repress the memories of that pain from their memory, but that doesn’t mean the pain heals or disappears.