The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves ….

People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be-both in t….

Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humili….

Problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience..

We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respe….

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath..

Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child..

An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time..

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our fee….

We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else..

It is not true that evil, destructiveness , and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is….

The achievement of freedom is hardly possible without the felt mourning. This ability to mourn, i.e, to give up the illusion of a happy childhood, ca….

The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings..

If we do not work on all three levels -- body, feeling, mind -- the symptoms of our distress will keep returning, as the body goes on repeating the s….

What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood..

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeli….

It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me expe….

I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--becaus….

Courage can be just as infectious as fear..

someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, but which ….

The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation..