When the patient has consciously and repeatedly experienced how the whole process of her upbringing manipulated and damaged her in her childhood, and with what desires for revenge this has left her, then she will see through manipulation more quickly than before and will herself have less need to manipulate others. Such a patient will be able to

we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.

A loved child learns from the beginning what love is. A neglected, exploited, and mistreated child like me can’t know it; she never had the chance to learn it.

When our children can consciously experience their early helplessness and rage, they will no longer need to ward off these feelings, in turn, with the exercise of power over others. In most cases, however, people’s childhood suffering remains affectively inaccessible and thus forms the hidden source of new and sometimes very subtle humiliation for

There are people, for example, who never say a loud or angry word, who seem to be only good and noble, and who still give others the palpable feeling of being ridiculous or stupid or too noisy, or at any rate too common compared with themselves. They do not know it and perhaps do not intend it, but this is what they radiate: the attitude of their

It is part of the dialectic of the grieving process that the experience of pain both encourages and is dependent on self-discovery.

But I am so often in danger of suppressing my need with the help of my whole energy and my intellect. I think that I must “free” myself from this attachment, that it is “wrong.” Why? How have you brought me to feel these silly things? Maybe, by teaching me so early that a child doesn’t deserve respect, that he is not a person, that he can be used

In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood, manifested as the total alienation from the self in the adult.

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 that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her