It is part of the dialectic of the grieving process that the experience of pain both encourages and is dependent on self-discovery. If the psychotherapist invites the patient to share in his own “grandeur,” or if the patient is enabled to feel powerful as part of a therapeutic group, he will experience relief from his depression for a while, but the disturbance will still exist, appearing in a different guise for a time.
Because grandiosity is the counterpart of depression within the narcissistic disturbance, the achievement of freedom from both forms of disturbance is hardly possible without deeply felt mourning about the situation of the former child. This ability to grieve — that is, to give up the illusion of his “happy” childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt he has endured — can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on his Sisyphean task.
If a person is able, during this long process, to experience the reality that he was never loved as a child for what he was but was instead needed and exploited for his achievements, success, and good qualities — and that he sacrificed his childhood for this form of love — he will be very deeply shaken, but one day he will feel the desire to end these efforts. He will discover in himself a need to live according to his true self and no longer be forced to earn “love” that always leaves him empty-handed, since it is given to his false self—something he has begun to identify and relinquish.
— The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self Third Edition (Alice Miller), Loc. 753–64