Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nobody is born evil.
Empathy grows as we learn.
Disrespect is the weapon of the weak
Courage can be just as infectious as fear.
You gotta keep that in check - you got to.
One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.
Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.
Problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience.
Today I should not be identified with any kind of regressive therapy.
Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing.
We produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.
We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.
The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.
Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.
There are people who have benefited from therapy without being confronted with the past at all.
Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.
An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.
Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.
Society chooses to disregard the mistreatment of children, judging it to be altogether normal because it is so commonplace.
The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.
For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.
All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection
If a mother respects both herself and her child from his very first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others.
Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.
That probably greatest of narcissistic wounds -- not to have been loved just as one truly was -- cannot heal without the work of mourning.
Depression leads him close to his wounds, but only the mourning for what he has missed, missed at the crucial time, can lead to real healing.
The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.
What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.
One of the best ways of keeping your temper in an argument, as most of us know only too well, is not to listen to anything the other person has to say.
It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion - something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.
Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.
If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center - the central actor - in his own activity.
Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course - because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you.
The commandment to refrain from placing blame on our parents, deeply imprinted in us by our upbringing, skillfully performs the function of hiding essential truths from us.
Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.
The abused children are alone with their suffering, not only within the family, but also within themselves. They cannot crate a place in their own soul where they could cry their beart out.
The father receives his power from God (and from his own father). The teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.
We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.
The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves.
Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.
Discipline is ... life-inhibiting, is at the very least curtailment of vital activity insofar as the latter cannot develop as it wishes but is confined within specific limits and subjected to specific rules.
The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.
I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.
Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.
The free expression of resentment against one's parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one's true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and - with luck - reconciliation.
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.
If we do not work on all three levels -- body, feeling, mind -- the symptoms of our distress will keep returning, as the body goes on repeating the story stored in its cells until it is finally listened to and understood.
The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.
The only possible recourse a baby has when his screams are ignored is to repress his distress, which is tantamount to mutilating his soul, for the result is an interference with his ability to feel, to be aware, and to remember.