Quotes About Healing

Maybe there is something deeply wrong with me," Carol tells me. "It's just like my mom used to say, I am too difficult to love.

Emotional connection is crucial to healing. In fact, trauma experts overwhelmingly agree that the best predictor of the impact of any trauma is not the severity of the event, but whether we can seek and take comfort from others.

Injuries may be forgiven, but they never disappear. Instead, in the best outcome, they become integrated into couples' attachment stories as demonstrations of renewal and connection.

It is not for people who are in abusive or violent relationships, nor for those with serious addictions or in long-term affairs; such activities undermine the ability to positively engage with partners.

Find the Bad Guy is a dead-end pattern of mutual blame that effectively keeps a couple miles apart, blocking reengagement and the creation of a safe haven.

have to do this. Let's stop. Come over and just let's have a hug.' And she did. It felt great." I asked

As the Irish poet John O'Donohue puts it, "There is a huge and leaden loneliness settling like a frozen winter on so many humans.

Later I used to wonder why it was so difficult for him to bear the pain of his family when he was so forgiving of the pain of his patients.

It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.

There's no pain on earth that doesn't crave a benevolent witness.

In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.

Regrets don't help anything.

The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language, I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die, a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.

I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.

I felt someone should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one & say, we are sorry, but something strong & lasting had to do this for May, & you are the chosen ones. God bless your rock hearts.

Sarah was up in her room with her heart broke so bad, Binah said you could hear it jangle when she walked.

He came to see, and I did too, that patriarchy wounds men also, that men have their own journeys to make in order to heal and differentiate themselves from it.

Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray's mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother--that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?

Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you never will outpace your grief.