Go back

I can rage when you hurt me, without losing you.

It is precisely because a child's feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be

I owe these insights to my lonely work.

A child can never see through unconscious manipulation. It is like the air he breathes

A house built out of self-betrayal will sooner or later fall down and mercilessly destroy human life

[...] have stayed with him as repressed memory, stored up in his body.

[a] sense of a tragic history.

I was unable to question what I was told, because hypocrisy had been the food I was fed daily by my mother - it was so familiar to me, though never questionable. But today I do question things that do not make sense to me.

Above all, there is the mechanism of turning repressed suffering into active behavior.

This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home.

However paradoxical this may seem, a child is at the mother's disposal. The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child's eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did. A child can be brought up so that it becomes what she wants it to be. A child can be made to show respect; she can impose her own feelings on him, see herself mirrored in his love and admiration, and feel strong in his presence. But when he becomes too much, she can abandon that child to a stranger or to solitary confinement in another room.

With such illusions, no one can truly heal. The strength within ourselves - through access to out own real needs and feelings and the possibility of expressing them - is crucially important for us if we want to live without depression and addiction.

We can then become fully aware of these patterns and condemn them unequivocally.

As an infant I was conditioned by my father to look for pleasure connected with pain and rage and to avoid true love. Was it not a perversion?

They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were, and this is more striking as these patients not only have a pronounced introspective ability but seem, to some degree, to be able to empathize with other people. Their access to the emotional world of their own childhood, however, is impaired

awareness about the implications of his own childhood, which he described as one long story of humiliation.

It would not be surprising if our unconscious need should find no better way than to make use of a weaker person.

I hated you because you preferred being with them to being with me.

the earliest traumas, which are often hidden behind the picture of an idyllic childhood or even behind an almost complete amnesia.

children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility.

the cost of our own emotional development: [...] being able to experience the resentment and mourning aroused by our parents' failure to fulfil our primary needs.

to confront her parents in an inner dialogue

The more unrealistic such feelings are and the less they fit present reality, the more clearly they show that they are concerned with unremembered situations from the past that are still to be discovered.

Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the therapy of the adult, they are accompanied by intense pain and despair. It is clear that these people could don't have survived so much pain as children. That would have been possible only in an empathic, attentive environment, which was lacking. Thus all feelings had to be warded off. But to say that they were absent would be a denial of the empirical evidence.

At first it will be mortifying to see that she is not always good, understanding, tolerant, controlled, and, above all, without needs, for these have been the basis of her self-respect.

there has been evidence that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their toll on society

Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear.

This child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively, that is, unconsciously, to this need of the mother, or of both parents, for him to take on the role that had unconsciously been assigned to him.

But the experience of one's own truth, and the postmabivalent knowledge of it, make it possible to return to one's own world of feelings at an adult level - without paradise, but with the ability to mourn. And this ability does, indeed, give us back our vitality.

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.

to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal

True autonomy is preceded by the experience of being dependent.

Visualizza tutte le foto