Quotes About Parents

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 persons. In any case, I don't know of a single person who enjoyed this respect as a child and then as an adult had the need to put other human beings to death.

The legacy of the parents is yet another generation condemned to hide from the true self while operating unconsciously under the influence of repressed memories. Unless the heir casts off his "inheritance" by becoming fully conscious of his true past, and thus of his true nature, loneliness in the parental home will necessarily be followed by an adulthood lived in emotional isolation.

To escape this vicious cycle we must face the truth. And we can do it. We were humiliated children; we were the victims of our parents' ignorance, the victims of their history, of the unconscious scars with which childhood left them. We had no choice but to deny the truth.

If the repression stays unresolved, the parents' childhood tragedy is unconsciously continued on in their children.

My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents' behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all.

they ward off any kind of accusation from the parents who once maltreated them so severely. They do not know what that treatment has done to them, they do not know how much they have suffered from it. Above all, they do not want to know. They see it as something beneficial, something inflicted on them for their own good. Self-therapy

The cruelty of individuals is not something imposed on them by some mysterious agency but by their parents and other people involved in their upbringing. It takes shape in the brain of a child exposed to cruelty.

A higher being dependent on inauthentic feelings dictated by morality is strongly reminiscent of the insecurity displayed by our frustrated and disoriented parents. Such a being can be called God only by people who have never questioned their own parents or thought about their dependency on them.

This role secured "love" for the child—that is, his parents' exploitation. He could sense that he was needed, and this need guaranteed him a measure of existential security.

Many of the Ten Commandments can still claim validity today. But the Fourth Commandment is diametrically opposed to the laws of psychology. It is imperative that there be general recognition of the fact that enforced "love" can do a very great deal of harm. People who were loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.

When children are born, what they need most from their parents is love, by which I mean affection, attention, care, protection, kindness, and the willingness to communicate.

The older we get, the more difficult it is to find other people who can give us the love our parents denied us. But the body's expectations do not slacken with age—quite the contrary! They are merely directed at others, usually our own children and grandchildren. The only way out of this dilemma is to become aware of these mechanisms and to identify the reality of our own childhood by counteracting the processes of repression and denial.

People who were loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.

They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency actively fosters the hatred that, though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless.

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.

The child's dependence on his or her parents' love also makes it impossible in later years to recognize these traumatizations, which often remain hidden behind the early idealization of the parents for the rest of the child's life.

The true source of her illness was the unfulfilled longing for communication, the deprivation of genuine contact with her parents and boyfriend. Her refusal to eat was the sign of this deficiency. Ultimately her recovery was possible because Anita realized that there were people who could and did understand her.

If the path to experiencing one's feelings is blocked either the prohibitions of poisonous pedagogy or by the needs of the parents, then these feelings will have to be lived out. This can occur either in a destructive form, as in Hitler's case, or in a self-destructive one, as in Christiane F.'s. Or, as in the case of most criminals who end up in prison, this living out can lead to the destruction both of the self and of others.

Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after -- like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word

There are secret rooms inside us," I had said to my therapist. "A relatively benign construct," he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.

But in this time we are beginning to see and hear from mothers and fathers who assume the role of Those Who Also Know. The world is getting its Elders back.

Toddlers are scared that displeasing their parents will result in losing their love, and this fear finds expression in the common difficulties of toddlerhood, such as separation anxiety, sleep disturbances, and inexplicable fears.

Whatever was going on between my parents, I suppose that my fantasy of self-sufficiency, my heavy investment in my own mind, is also a kind of narcissistic cathexis.

And the Children of the Warmakers're exempt from fighting their parents' war