How do our first experiences of pain and love affect our future? This is the key question. Alice Miller shows us people who have suffered great loneliness in childhood and who now, in adulthood, despite their yearnings for contact and communication, are still trapped in inner isolation. But encounters with others who had the good fortune to grow up in loving families open them to new worlds in which they too can learn to change.

As we watch, some manage to speak the truth, to free themselves of old fears and defensive myths, to trust. The luckiest come to love and be loved -- by partners, friends, and their own children, whom they can then free from the curse of having to relive their parents' inner traumas.