Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.
Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.
We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.
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.
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.
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.
One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.
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.
Regression to the stage of early infancy is not a suitable method in and of itself. Such a regression can only be effective if it happens in the natural course of therapy and if the client is able to maintain adult consciousness at the same time.
Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings.
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.
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.
It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.
Only the mourning for what one has missed at the crucial time can lead to real healing.
You gotta keep that in check – you got to.
Today I should not be identified with any kind of regressive therapy.
An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.
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.
Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her and to be mirrored by her.
The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.