Daily Inspiration Quote by Alice Miller

Miller is putting a guardrail on one of therapy's most seductive fantasies: that you can crawl back into the crib, re-experience the original wound, and come out clean. Her phrasing - "not a suitable method in and of itself" - is a quiet rebuke to schools of therapy that treat cathartic regression like a technique you can administer on schedule. The subtext is clinical but pointed: chasing infancy can become its own defense, a dramatic detour that feels profound while dodging the harder work of integration.

The second sentence is where Miller's ethic shows. Regression is not banned; it's demoted. It can be "effective" only if it arises "in the natural course of therapy" - meaning in a relationship sturdy enough to hold it, not in a ritual engineered to produce tears. That clause also smuggles in a power critique: if a therapist induces infantile states, the client becomes maximally suggestible, and the therapist becomes a kind of director. Miller, who spent much of her career warning about the ways adult authority can reenact childhood domination, is allergic to that dynamic.

Most important is her insistence on "adult consciousness at the same time". That's the paradox that makes the line work: you can touch the preverbal terror, but you can't surrender the observing self. In Miller's world, healing isn't reliving pain for its own sake; it's re-entering it with language, boundaries, and choice - the very things early infancy lacked.