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"... the most powerful emotional dynamic in human existence:
"If we break an arm and take painkillers for a week, everyone understands where
the pain is, how bad it might be, and the necessity for taking painkillers....
"In this way a pain now, a rejection, can resonate with serious past rejection from our parents and thereby produce an anxiety attack. It gives weight to the present reaction, which may seem inordinate, but in reality is the bottom rung of a neuronal circuit."
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Quotes
"Now the idea that our parents did not love us well or sufficiently is one that creates enormous resistance in people. Better to believe the fault lies within us, then at least we maintain the illusion that we can win their love if only we cut our hair, take a bath, become a doctor, marry the right person, earn more money, call home more often -- you fill in the blanks to fit the situation."
"There is nothing which is more necessary and more precious in the experience of human childhood than parental love.... nothing more precious, because the parental love experienced in childhood is moral capital for the whole of life.... It is so precious, this experience, that it renders us capable of elevating ourselves to more sublime things--even divine things. It is thanks to the experience of parental love that our soul is capable of raising itself to the love of God.
"The stress of our lives and tension which emerges has much more relationship to our early histories than to our daily lives in the present. . . Even when one cries for a parent at a funeral, the
agonizing quality of the grief derives from infancy, when love-loss was totally unbearable, much less from the present."
". . . (T)he most painful disease I have every seen is that of an unloved child."
". . . (T)he 'Casanova syndrome,' which compels a man to try to show himself that he is lovable by making up in numbers of conquests what is missing in the special quality of love that should have been found in his mother, the kind that assures one of one's existence and one's worth."
"Every case of psychotherapy, to a greater or lesser extent, is a problem of a failure to love."
"The first real choice a human baby must make is whether to trust or mistrust other humans. This basic trust-versus-mistrust stage is the first building block upon which all later love relationships are formed."
"To be fully open to the baby's emotional needs is to become reacquainted with oneself as a baby, to reexperience the pain of being totally dependent and desperate in love and yet being shut out and feeling unwanted."
"Ninety percent of the people I meet are dealing with issues they can't overcome because of bad parenting. That's the truth. There's that side of you that says, `Time to get over the hurt and move on,' ... It's hard to do. So you just hang on to the emotion that this one didn't love me, or why didn't that relationship last? That stuff stays with you forever. You want to say, `Get over yourself! Come on! Time to grow up!' Some people are able to do that, but a lot of us remain victims of it. So I was fortunate with my parents."'
"I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood, but always more positively -- because idealization of his parents was essential for survival."
"Parents are a serious adaptive problem for the infant. -- Weston LaBarre, Anthropologist
"People who have been traumatically abused are saddled with the worst expectations - terrifying anxiety, loss of control, feeling like killing and being killed,(and) being alone and unable to survive in a murderous universe."
"...Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair."
"The first notion of identity in the infant, what is most his own, comes from the outside. . . through the mother's gaze, the infant (receives) precise instructions as to "who he is" and "how he must be" in order to be loved and recognized. . . "
"Some women have children only to express how desperately they want to be loved as only babies are loved, and to try to wrest from the experience of giving birth the nurturance they never received from their mother."
"Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage."
"You show me a murderer and I'll show you a person who's been failed in the supreme need for love -- who never learned how to love. . . ."
"The expectation that her search for love will be rewarded at last by her own love-needy infant is the tragedy of many a woman. And of course, it is a looming factor in the quality of deprivation suffered by the child. . . What could be more pathetic than a child crying for want of mothering and the mother striking out at it because it is not mothering her in answer to her longing?"
Our national spotlight should clearly be on the crib -- not on the criminal -- if we are to change the future. Infants who do not receive a warm welcome into the world will seek their revenge."
"The trauma that causes neurosis is lack of love and attention from parents."
"Each generation begins anew with fresh, eager, trusting faces of babies, ready to love and create a new world. And each generation of parents tortures, abuses, neglects and dominates its children until they become emotionally crippled adults who repeat in nearly exact detail the social violence and domination that existed in previous decades."
"How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?" "We call a person 'normal' if the self-deception that he uses to repress, deny, displace, and rationalize those basic wounds that are ubiquitous in human beings from babyhood works quite well. He is 'normal' in so far as his defenses against too much painful reality are as successful as (all unbeknown to the person himself) they are meant to be." -- Frank Lake, M.D.
"The fact that many people find romantic excitement in a lover who displays the qualities of a rejecting parent, an excitement that they do not find in others, suggests the degree to which they remain not just committed to but enthralled by early attachment figures. They can't let go of the mother or father who didn't love them the way they needed to be loved. And they continue to be betwiched by the hurtfulness that compromised their care."
"Our unique desire and ability to fall in love have to do with attachment experiences we all had very early in life, before we even knew what was happening to us. Attachment leaves such a lasting impression that much of our later life is spent trying to recreate its specific character, for better for worse. We are intensely attracted to those particular individuals who resonate with our earliest emotional map."
"In every nursery there are ghosts," such that "a parent and his child may find themselves re-enacting a moment or a scene from another time with another set of characters."
". . . the rage of psychopaths is that born of unfulfilled needs as infants. Incomprehensible pain is forever locked in their souls, because of the abandonment they felt as infants."
"The catecholamines which convey the 'messages' to do with emotions round the mother's circulation, gearing all her organs and cells to feeling joy or sorrow, love or loathing, vitality or exhaustion, pass through the placental barrier (which to these substances is no barrier) into the foetal blood stream via the umbilical vein.
In this context the foetus does its own emotional homework and responds, either passively accepting the mother's bad feelings as its own, as if true for itself, or by being protestingly overwhelmed by them. It can aggressively fight them back, in resolute opposition to sharing the mother's sickness. Others become 'fetal therapists' trying to bolster up a debilitated and debilitating mother from their own feelings of relative strength. Sensitivity to 'poisonous' feelings coming from a rejecting mother is very great . . .To be the focus of mother's love imprints a confidence that 'sets us up' for life."
"She may have been full of anger internally, while fear, compliance or compassion prevented its ever being shown externally. She may have loved the man by whom she became pregnant, while hating the resultant fetus, or loved the prospect of having a baby, while hating, fearing or feeling deeply disappointed and neglected by its father. The fetus receives all such messages but has difficulty in distinguishing what relates specifically to it and what belongs to the mother's feelings about her own life in general."
"I believe first of all that which all my patients assert, that the embryo already feels plainly whether its mother loves it or not, whether she gives it much love, little love, or none at all, in many instances in fact in place of love sheer hate."
"A baby born today has a roughly 50-50 chance of keeping his father. This is the first generation of American kids who must face not the sad loss of fathers to death, but the far more brutal knowledge that, to their fathers, many other things are more important than they are."
"As we have seen, those who underwent persecutory experiences in the first year have many ways of defending against the emergence into adult consciousness of their infantile 'descent' into hell. These defences may break down in adolescence or middle life, but most commonly they take from forty to sixty years before they break down. When they do become de-repressed and emerge into consciousness, we encounter the persecuted infant exactly in the state of terror in which it was `put down'. And we see, in retrospect, that the paranoid or otherwise distorted personality pattern which has made this man or woman so difficult to live with over the years has all along been a defensive position based on unforgettable, unrecallable, 'memories' of this infantile descent into hell."
"Complications in the intimate emotional reaction with one's mother or father can cause recurrent problems with sexual partners."
"Intimacy is showing another person the parts of ourselves that we believe to be unworthy and thereby risking that they will turn from us the way our parents did. . . Intimacy brings with it tenderness and humor, companionship and affection, but it also demands that we relive the most agonizing moments of being a child."
"It is not merely a question of inner conflict or of 'growing up.' 'Stop fussing over what your parents did to you!' as skeptics command patients in therapy. The scar consists of changed anatomy and chemistry within the brain."
"A parent may feel rejective toward a child, consciously or unconsciously, constantly or intermittently, but seek to suppress this feeling by not permitting it to come through in actions. But there is a belief that the child senses the true feeling."
"If a child does not receive adequate attention and richness of social experience in early life, the results are apt to be irreversible. No amount of subsequent training can fully compensate for the error. Nature relies heavily on the behavior of the mother toward the newborn in its first years of life. . . The measure of love the child receives, the types of training and education and the time when they take place, will determine the characteristics of the future man."
"The first notion of identity in the infant, what is most his own, comes from the outside. . . through the mother's gaze, the infant (receives) precise instructions as to "who he is" and "how he must be" in order to be loved and recognized. . . "
"So many of the patients have experienced a neglect of their most basic, deepest human needs -- for touching and for companionship, for sharing inner feelings, for expressing creative energy, for sexual fulfillment, for personal validation, and for the giving and receiving of love. Instead their lives were characterized by duty and obligation to the very people who gave them little or nothing in return."
"In the self-help literature directed at parents virtually no attention is paid to the emotional upheavals that the parent is likely to face -- the disturbing return of long banished feelings, the sense of being driven to behave in ways that one would rather not think about, the haunting sensation of being inhabited by the ghost of one's own mother or father as one tries to relate to one's child." "The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother." -- Anonymous
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