Quotes About Pain

Behind manifest grandiosity, there constantly lurks depression, and behind a depressive mood there often hide unconscious (or conscious but split off) fantasies of grandiosity. In fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self.

Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.

AS A CHILD I had to learn to suppress my entirely natural responses to the injuries inflicted on me, responses like rage, anger, pain, and fear.

fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self that results from denial.

If I as a helpless child was abused and am not allowed to see this, I will abuse other helpless creatures without realizing what I am doing. I will also refuse to read books on abuse, or I won't want to understand them because, if I did, I would have to feel the tragedy of my childhood and the pain of having been misled at such an early age.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the 'smallest', but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering. . .

Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.

It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.

She was a woman I would recognize now as a likely sufferer from varicose veins, hemorrhoids, a dropped womb, cysted ovaries, inflammations, discharges, lumps and stones in various places, one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life, with stories to tell.

Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

She ached in expected and unexpected places.

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

And as Flora twirled, other girls and women came through the field in all directions. Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

Every time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

His cruelty was in his absence.

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if you seal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone.

It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn't serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other's arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.

Like someone who has survived a gun-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.