People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
Interpretation
Childhood experiences significantly influence adult emotions and behaviors.
This quote by Karl A. Menninger emphasizes the profound impact that early emotional experiences have on individuals as they grow into adulthood. It suggests that many emotional and psychological struggles encountered later in life can often be traced back to unmet needs or traumatic experiences during childhood, implying that proper care and attention in early years are crucial for healthy emotional development.
In practice
In a therapy session discussing the root of anxiety, a client might find value in this quote to highlight their childhood experiences.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
What's done to children, they will do to society.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
Psychopaths are social predators, and like all predators, they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money, you will find them.
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me. Because, quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is, 'You want to know what's wrong with me.'
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era--but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
Both dreams and neurotic dream-states have as their function the avoidance of displeasure, but the dream-states also serve to provide a positive pleasure gain.
The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.