Opening a Sealed Chest

As I shared a few days back, I am reading a book by Alice Miller.  I want to post a paragraph from her work The Body Never Lies. (149)

"But I believe in time there will be more and more of them (referring to positive healing in adults), as we realize that we owe no gratitude, and certainly no sacrifices, to parents who abused us when we were small.  These sacrifices are made for the sake of phantoms, idealized parents who have never existed.  Why do we go on sacrificing ourselves for the sake of phantoms?  Why do we remain the captives of relationships that remind us of the torments we went through when we were young?  Because we hope that someday this will change, if we can find the magic word, assume the right attitude, achieve the right kind of understanding.  But that would mean contorting ourselves in the same way as we did in our childhoods in attempt to obtain love.  Today, as adults, we know that our efforts were exploited, that this was not love in the true sense of the word.  So why do we ultimately expect love from people who, for whatever reason, were unable to love us when we were small? 
If we succeed in abandoning that hope, those expectations will fall away, taking with them the self-deception that has been a constant factor in our lives.  We no longer believe that we are not worth loving; we no longer believe we must prove that we are worthy of love after all.  We are not to blame. It is the fault of the situation our parents found themselves in, what they made of the childhood traumas they themselves went through, the progress they made (or failed to make) in coming to terms with those traumas.  There is nothing we can do to change all that.  All we can do is live our own lives and change our attitudes accordingly."