Quotes

More Quotes

• "Just as too much physical force can break a child’s bones, too much control can break a child’s spirit and fracture his psyche. It can cause a splintering of self, causing a child to disown some parts of himself and to inflate others."

  — Beverly Engel

  Healing the Emotional Self

• "The child wants simple things. It wants to be listened to. It wants to be loved.… It may not even know the words, but it wants its rights protected and its self-respect unviolated. It needs you to be there."

  — Ron Kurtz

  As cited in Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

• "One must have a chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star."

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  Thus Spake Zarathustra

• "Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering."

  — Peter A. Levine PhD

  https://www.somaticexperiencing.com

• "… what doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger."

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  Twilight of the Idols

• "The person … in the grip of an old distress says things that are not pertinent, does things that don’t work, fails to cope with the situation, and endures terrible feelings that have nothing to do with the present."

  — Harvey Jackins

  As cited in Homecoming

• "The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

  — Ernest Hemingway

  A Farewell to Arms

• "Just as too much physical force can break a child’s bones, too much control can break a child’s spirit and fracture his psyche. It can cause a splintering of self, causing a child to disown some parts of himself and to inflate others."

  — Beverly Engel

  Healing The Emotional Self

• "… trauma, undigested and locked in our body, randomly breaks through into consciousness. For years after the actual danger is past, a person who has been traumatized may relive an event as if it were continually occurring in the present."

  — Tara Brach

  Radical Acceptance

• "Our ability as parents to be open and present for our children enables them to be both differentiated from our own expectations and desires for how they should be and linked to us through compassionate, respectful communication, enabling the integrative circuitry of their brains to develop well."

  — Daniel J. Siegel, MD

  Aware

• "The best way to help a child through a challenging moment is to give them a story about it, whether they’re being bullied, have fallen in love for the first time, or the tooth-fairy failed to show up."

  — Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin

  The Story Cure

• "Traumas can be defined as experiences that cause people to develop erroneous beliefs about themselves or the world which keep them from living to their full potential and causing them suffering."

  — Laurel Parnell

  Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Spiritual Unfolding

• "If you want your child to reach her potential, one of the most important traits to nurture is tenacity—the “I’ll stick with it” approach to challenges."

  — Kenneth R. Ginsburg, Martha M. Jablow

  Building Resilience in Children and Teens

• "If we want our children to experience the world as fully as possible—unfortunately with all its pain, and thankfully with all its joy—our goal will have to be resilience."

  — Kenneth R. Ginsburg, Martha M. Jablow

  Building Resilience in Children and Teens

• "Our challenge is to recognize the gifts in every child and, more importantly, create the circumstances in which young people will discover their own strengths, so they can ultimately determine those areas in which they can make their greatest contributions."

  — Kenneth R. Ginsburg, Martha M. Jablow

  Building Resilience in Children and Teens

• "We must prepare our children to thrive and succeed far into the future. We need to bear in mind that our goal in raising children is to prepare them to be successful at 35, 40, or 50 years of age."

  — Kenneth R. Ginsburg, Martha M. Jablow

  Building Resilience in Children and Teens

• "Our love is the most protective, enduring force we offer our children… The genuine sense that they are worth being cared for offers the bedrock of self-regard that will affect their behaviors and emotional well-being during childhood and adolescence, as well as the security from which they will launch into adulthood."

  — Kenneth R. Ginsburg, Martha M. Jablow

  Building Resilience in Children and Teens

• "Those of us who have suffered from extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse have a big challenge trying to create a loving Inner Adult."

  — Margaret Paul

  Inner Bonding

• "When our Inner Child feels consistently unloved by our Inner Adult, the Child’s false beliefs, adopted in childhood when parents were unloving, are reinforced—beliefs that we are bad, wrong, unlovable, unimportant, inadequate, defective in some way."

  — Margaret Paul

  Inner Bonding

• "We must gently help our children be exposed to the injured heart of another so they can consider the impact of their unkind behavior."

  — Susan Stiffelman

  Parenting with Presence

• "If we want our children to discover their passion and purpose, we must stay open to what they drift toward rather than pushing them in directions we prefer they follow but that do not call to them."

  — Susan Stiffelman

  Parenting with Presence

• "Kids whose boundaries are respected have a much easier time setting them appropriately with their peers."

  — Susan Stiffelman

  Parenting with Presence

• "It is our challenge and opportunity to foster in our children the living, breathing knowledge that they are worthy — as is — of being loved."

  — Susan Stiffelman

  Parenting with Presence

• "We need to raise our children to know they are inherently worthy of love and happiness so that they will be able to absorb all the good that comes their way."

  — Susan Stiffelman

  Parenting with Presence

• "Establishing boundaries helps us raise children who know how to handle disappointment and who are therefore strong, adaptable, and self-reliant."

  — Susan Stiffelman

  Parenting with Presence

• "Parental neglect and rejection in childhood can adversely affect self-confidence and relationships in adulthood, as people repeat old, frustrating patterns and then blame themselves for not being happy."

  — Lindsay C. Gibson

  Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

• "Attentive and reliable emotional relationships are the basis of a child’s sense of security. Unfortunately, emotionally immature parents are usually too uncomfortable with closeness to give their children the deep emotional connection they need."

  — Lindsay C. Gibson

  Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

• "In overcoming the destructive force of trauma, our innate potential… lifts us to new heights of mastery and knowledge."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "The challenge of trauma treatment is not only dealing with the past but, even more, enhancing the quality of day-to-day experience… When you can’t be fully here, you go to the places where you did feel alive—even if those places are filled with horror and misery."

  — Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

  The Body Keeps the Score

• "If you are experiencing strange symptoms that no one seems to be able to explain, they could be arising from a traumatic reaction to a past event that you may not even remember. You are not alone. You are not crazy. There is a rational explanation for what is happening to you. You have not been irreversibly damaged, and it is possible to diminish or even eliminate your symptoms."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed, but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative. Trauma has the potential to be one of the most significant forces for psychological, social, and spiritual awakening and evolution."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "Ultimately, the main goal of trauma therapy is to relegate the trauma to its rightful place in the client’s past."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "One of the difficulties of PTSD is the phenomenon of flashbacks, which involve highly disturbing replays of implicit sensory memories of traumatic events sometimes with explicit recall, sometimes without. The sensations that accompany them are so intense that the suffering individual is unable to distinguish the current reality from the past. It feels like it is happening now."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "While dissociation appears to be an instinctive response to save the self from suffering—and it does this very well—it exacts a high price in return."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "People first awaken to a spiritual dimension in their lives in an incredible variety of ways. Some people seem to open up to it through traumatic experiences… Other people awaken through meditation or through religious experiences. Others arrive at it through sex or through drugs."

  — Ram Dass

  Polishing the Mirror