It was not until she could make her reproaches, first toward me and then toward her mother, that the core of her despair became conscious: her lifelong search for closeness and contact that had never been met in infancy and had become repressed. Repressed memories of the shy, distant, absent mother produced in the daughter the feeling of a wall, one that later separated her from other people in such a painful way. She was finally released from a compulsion to repeat that had consisted of constantly seeking a partner who had no understanding of her and then allowing herself to settle into an arrangement where she would feel helplessly dependent on him. The fascination of such tormenting relationships is a result of repressed memories and the struggle for a better outlet at last.
— The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self Third Edition (Alice Miller), Loc. 1048–53