From Magical Thinking to Self-Forgiveness: Breaking Free from Generational Grief
“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.” – Alice Miller
The Birth of Magical Thinking
I was eight years old, sitting at my desk with homework, when I first learned that love could mean making yourself invisible. My father had come home from another difficult day, carrying shadows I couldn’t name—the weight of war memories, his own father’s early death, disappointments that had nowhere to go but inward. He closed the kitchen door and spent the next hour alone.
It was almost a daily ritual: my mother in her sewing corner, my brother absorbed in his own world, and me with my math problems. No talking. No connection. Each of us isolated in our separate silence.
And in that silence, my eight-year-old mind made a fateful calculation: If I’m perfect enough, quiet enough, good enough, Dad won’t hurt. Mom won’t argue. If I can just solve this equation correctly, maybe I can solve what’s wrong in our house.
This is a concrete first memory I have that pinpoints the syndrome, but I believe it was there way before the age of eight—it was there from day one. Not something I can put in words but in the space between them.
That is the birth of magical thinking—the child’s belief that we have power over what we cannot control, that our behavior can alter realities far beyond us. What I didn’t understand then was how this innocent survival strategy would follow me into adulthood, slowly hardening into what I now understand as Internalized Blame of Self (IBS)—the grown-up echo of a child’s impossible bargain.
Understanding Child’s Magical Thinking: The Research and Reality
What Developmental Psychology Tells Us
“The child in us is always alive, and it is that child who often drives our deepest fears and hopes.” — Alice Miller
Magical thinking is a normal part of child development, typically emerging around ages 2-7. Jean Piaget called this the “preoperational stage,” where children believe their thoughts and actions can influence external events in impossible ways.
For most children, this manifests innocently—believing their teddy bear has feelings, imagining they caused the rain by feeling sad, or thinking they can fly if they wish hard enough. It’s the mind’s way of making sense of a confusing world before logical thinking develops.
But for children in dysfunctional families, magical thinking becomes something darker and more persistent. When faced with situations beyond their control—a parent’s addiction, depression, rage, or emotional absence—the child’s mind creates a story that gives them imaginary power: “This is happening because of something I did or didn’t do.”
The Survival Function of Magical Thinking
Child psychologist John Bradshaw explained why this distortion persists: if the problem is me, then I can fix it. This gives the powerless child a sense of agency, even if it’s false. It’s less terrifying to believe “I caused this” than to face the truth: “The adults I depend on are struggling with forces I cannot influence or understand.”
Dr. Alice Miller, in her groundbreaking work on childhood trauma, identified how this magical thinking serves as psychological protection. The child cannot afford to see their caregivers as fallible or unavailable. Survival depends on believing the adults are fundamentally safe, which means any problems must somehow originate with the child.
➡️ In her classic book The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller explains how children internalize blame to preserve the illusion of parental stability.
When Magical Thinking Becomes a Prison
What begins as adaptive behavior can calcify into Internalized Blame of Self. But magical thinking doesn’t always manifest as compliance and people-pleasing. Sometimes it erupts as rebellion—another form of the same desperate attempt to control the uncontrollable.
In my teenage years, something in me exploded. The child who had been so careful, so invisible, suddenly needed to carve his own way, to reject anything that felt like constraint. The discovery of sexuality made the world feel more bearable, but there was something deeper driving my rebellion: the need to be alone, to get away, to prove I didn’t need anyone.
During those years, I became my mother’s confidant. I had a close look at the longing for love she so desperately desired and the lengths she went to find it. I became the keeper of secrets I felt deeply honored to hold, but which also complicated my perspective of my father, manhood, loyalty, sex, love, and of course, the burden of secrets themselves.
This triangulated position—caught between my parents’ unspoken truths—only deepened my magical thinking. Now I wasn’t just responsible for fixing the family dynamics I could see, but also for managing the hidden emotional currents I alone seemed to witness. The rebellion wasn’t just against constraint—it was against the impossible weight of being the family’s secret-keeper.
This rebellion followed me into adulthood. At eighteen, I joined the military and never returned to live at my parents’ home. At twenty-seven, I left Israel for Los Angeles—ostensibly to find new horizons, but in truth, to escape. The same magical thinking that once whispered, “If I’m perfect enough, I can fix this,” now declared, “If I can just get far enough away, independent enough, I can control my own destiny.”
Both the compliant child and the rebellious adult were operating from the same core belief: I have the power to control my emotional safety through my behavior. One strategy was hypervigilance and fixing; the other was distance and defiance. Both were attempts to manage what couldn’t be managed.
The magical thinking persists because it served us once. Even when our rational minds know better, the emotional brain continues operating from the child’s logic—whether that’s “If I can just figure out what I’m doing wrong, I can make it right” or “If I can just get far enough away, I’ll finally be safe.”