Quotes About Understanding

They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were

These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If

A person is not likely to conceive something monstrous if he does not know it somehow or other from experience. We simply tend to refuse to take a child's suffering seriously enough.

In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place.

Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive. No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love.

empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear

The once-beaten children still living inside adults often fear being punished if they dare to truly SEE, without illusions, what their parents did to them in their first years of life. Once they understand that this danger no longer exists, they can liberate their life.

Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected.

With the infallibility of a sleepwalker, she will seek out those who, like her parents (though for different reasons), certainly cannot understand her. Because of her blindness caused by repression, she will try to make herself understandable to precisely these people—trying to make possible what cannot be.

If a mother can make it clear to a child that at that particular moment when she slapped him her love for him deserted her and she was dominated by other feelings that had nothing to do with the child, the child can keep a clear head, feel respected, and not be disoriented in his relationship to his mother.

Frequently, parents withhold such communication from the child, not because they are in any way malevolent but because they themselves never experienced such a token of affection in childhood and consequently do not know that such a thing exists. They can learn to communicate meaningfully with their children, but only if those children have the full support of a therapist who has shaken off the influence of poisonous pedagogy and is totally and unreservedly on the children's side.

True emotional understanding has nothing to do with cheap sentimental pity.

Their access to the emotional world of their own childhood, however, is impaired—characterized by a lack of respect, a compulsion to control and manipulate, and a demand for achievement. Very often they show disdain and irony, even derision and cynicism, for the child they were. In general, there is a complete absence of real emotional understanding or serious appreciation of their own childhood vicissitudes, and no conception of their true needs—beyond the desire for achievement.

These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.

Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?

All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be.

Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.

You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said - that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question.

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.

How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn't get hold of it at all. I