If this post resonates with you, there are two books I highly recommend, both by the renowned psychologist Alice Miller [1].
The first is For Your Own Good (1981), in which she describes the "poisonous pedagogy" of emotional and physical abuse passed down from generation to generation, and how we minimize and turn a blind eye to it because we want to follow the 4th commandment "Honor thy father and thy mother" (or in this case, a Confucian equivalent) -- at tremendous cost to ourselves, our own children, and society at large. It is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read.
The second is her more recent The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting (2005), which is more therapeutic and focused on how people's physical pain and sickness can dissipate when they are able to finally stand up for themselves and their own emotional needs, rather than continue to pretend their abusive parents were actually good.
Alice Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) is her best-known, but in my opinion, the above two books show her understanding evolving to become even more sophisticated.
The first is For Your Own Good (1981), in which she describes the "poisonous pedagogy" of emotional and physical abuse passed down from generation to generation, and how we minimize and turn a blind eye to it because we want to follow the 4th commandment "Honor thy father and thy mother" (or in this case, a Confucian equivalent) -- at tremendous cost to ourselves, our own children, and society at large. It is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read.
The second is her more recent The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting (2005), which is more therapeutic and focused on how people's physical pain and sickness can dissipate when they are able to finally stand up for themselves and their own emotional needs, rather than continue to pretend their abusive parents were actually good.
Alice Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) is her best-known, but in my opinion, the above two books show her understanding evolving to become even more sophisticated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)