Quotes About Healing

To free them from this isolation—the feeling of being the sole guardian of a guilty secret—parents would need to summon up the courage to admit their errors to their children. This would change the whole situation. In calm and collected conversation with their children they might say something like this:

Then, however, comes 'the work of forgiveness, which is apparently necessary if one is to heal. Many young people who have AIDS or are drug-addicted die in the wake of their effort to forgive so much. What they do not realize is that they are trying to keep the repression of their childhood intact.

However, it may also be true that there is still a small, unintegrated child living within, whose panic and fear have never been admitted, never consciously experienced, and thus direct themselves at others. These fears can suddenly assail us without apparent reason and cause us to panic. Unconscious fear of one's father or mother can last for decades if it has not been consciously experienced in the company of an enlightened witness.

Because the victims are "only children," their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years' time these children will be adults who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children.

Consciously experiencing one's own victimisation instead of trying to ward it off provides protection against sadism; i.e., the compulsion to torment and humiliate others.

What these adults need then is an enlightened witness who can accompany them on the road to their own truth, help them embark on a process in the course of which they will finally permit themselves the always-wanted but always-denied things: trust, respect, and love for themselves. We must abandon the expectation that someday the parents will give us what they withheld in childhood. This

Feelings of helplessness were mingled with long-dammed-up rage against the mother who had not been available to him when he needed her the most. As a result of becoming aware of these feelings, Peter could rid himself of a symptom that had tormented him for a long time; its point was now easy to understand. His relationships to women changed as his compulsion first to conquer and then to desert them disappeared.

Once we have learned to live with our feelings and not to fight against them, we see in the manifestations of our bodies not a danger but helpful indications about our own personal history.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.

there were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.

Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do - we do it all the time.

I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.

You save yourself or you remain unsaved

If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.

When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things.

Every time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living—to learn to accept?