[crazygringo]

Her son talks about the paradox of how she raised him abusively, and yet it was only through her books that he was able to heal himself many years later.

The timeline here is important -- her son was born in 1950, and her first book wasn't written until 29 years later.

I think it's much fairer to view her work as a heroic attempt to atone for her own sins. She was abused by her own parents, did the same to her children in turn, and then dedicated her entire professional life to figuring out how to break that cycle. It was too late for her own kids, but she was able to help others instead.

So it's unfair to judge her by saying she didn't practice what she preached, because they came at different times. What she wrote about was sadly informed by her own personal experience.

The Body Keeps the Score (by Bessel van der Kolk) is another great book, but it's about trauma generally, and especially things like PTSD. It doesn't focus much on specifically parental abuse the way the blog post, and Alice Miller, do.