El drama del niño dotado

To meet the expectations of their parents and to get their affection, many children are forced to make excessive efforts to become what has been expected of them from their earliest childhood. They then adopt, with brilliance and success, the role that others want them to play, but they do not allow themselves to express their feelings, they have already lost their identity, that is, all relationship with their true "I", and consequently they can only manifest those feelings repressed through depression or compulsive behaviors. When the time comes to be, in turn, parents, they can only inflict on their children the repression they themselves suffered. Recognizing to what extent you have denied your most intense feelings (anger, anguish, fear, pain...) is, as the prestigious psychiatrist Alice Miller shows, a first step to recover your identity. Using clarifying examples, The Drama of the Gifted Child, a classic work, analyzes the causes of affective repression and explores the paths in search of the true self.