Philippa Perry > Quotes

“It may help to remember when you receive a complaint that it is only nominally about you; it is really information about the person making the complaint.”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane

“Being kind does not mean you don’t share your feelings when you are angry. What it does mean is explaining how you feel and why but without blaming or insulting the other person.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“Does your ‘good behaviour’ go deep or is it merely manners? Are you pleasant on the surface, but do you then condemn people behind their backs?”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read [and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did]

“The core of parenting is the relationship you have with your child. If people were plants, the relationship would be the soil. The relationship supports, nurtures, allows growth—or inhibits it. Without a relationship they can lean on, a child’s sense of their security is compromised. You want the relationship to be a source of strength for your child—and, one day, for their children too.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“whatever age your child is, they are liable to remind you, on a bodily level, of the emotions you went through when you were at a similar stage.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that the main curative part of psychotherapy is the relationship itself. It appears not to be relevant which psychology school the practitioner belongs to. What matters is the quality of the relationship and the practitioner's belief in what he or she is offering.”
― Philippa Perry

“If feelings are left out of it, both sides can get more and more heated as they play what I call “fact tennis,” lobbing reasons over the net to each other, finding more and more to hit the other person with. In this style of arguing, the aim of the conflict becomes to win points rather than find a workable solution. Finding out about differences and working through them is about understanding and compromise, not about winning.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“As we get older it is our short term memory that fades rather than our long term memory. Perhaps we have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to thrive.

I worry though, about what might happen to our minds if most of the stories we hear are about greed, war, and atrocity”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane

“If I do not keep on testing my limits, my comfort-zone shrinks back. Challenges that had seemed comfortable one year took courage to achieve the next. I do not want to get into that position again, so onwards and outwards.”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane

“A novel, or a book on philosophy, is going to use both sides of the brain: not only will you have feelings about what you read, but your mind will also get more of a work-out because you will make connections between what you are learning and what you already recognize.”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane

“The practice of self-observation mirrors the way in which a mother observes and attunes to her baby. Self-observation is a method of re-parenting ourselves. ... What am I feeling now? What am I thinking now? What am I doing at this moment? How am I breathing? What do I want for myself in this new moment?”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane

“Ruptures—those times when we misunderstand each other, when we make wrong assumptions, when we hurt someone—are inevitable in every important intimate and familial relationship. It is not the rupture that is so important, it is the repair that matters.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“So much of what we have inherited sits just outside of our awareness. That makes it hard sometimes to know whether we are reacting in the here and now to our child’s behavior or whether our responses are more rooted in our past.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“If being authoritarian is your go-to way of being with your children, you are also risking their future relationship with authority. It may block them from being able to cooperate with authority or being able to be a leader themselves, or you may breed a dictator.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“Extremes appear not to be the best way forward for sanity. I say make a mark, put a foot onto the path, see (and feel and think) how it lands; and then you can make a good guess about where to put the next foot.”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane

“Remember: when there is a problem, do not just concentrate on the child and do not think the problem just lies with them. Look at your relationship and what’s happening between you. That’s where you’ll find your answer.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read [and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did]

“This is what learning does. It gives us more things to think about so we have less time to get bored, depressed and under-stimulated. It builds on our existing knowledge and expands it. IT leads us to make more connections by linking together more neural pathways. It also connects our brains to other people's brains.”
― Philippa Perry

“Encourage them to draw how they feel or say how they feel and then accept those feelings.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“There are three main styles of coping: thinking, feeling, and doing. If someone you love is going through a difficult time, try to understand what their coping style is and then feel with them rather than trying to deal with it from the start.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Want Everyone You Love to Read: Sane And Sage Advice to Help You Navigate All of Your Most Important Relationships

“You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.

[…]

Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. … I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane

“We can’t help but imagine what other people’s attitudes toward us are. But I always say, if you are going to have a fantasy about what someone else thinks about you, make it a good one. It might not change anything, but you’ll be calmer.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Want Everyone You Love* To Read *

“How we feel about ourselves and how much responsibility we take for how we react to our children are key aspects of parenting that are too often overlooked because it’s much easier to focus instead on our children and their behaviors rather than examining how they affect us and then how we in turn affect them. And it is not only how we respond to children that shapes their personality traits and character but also what they witness and feel in their environment. I”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“A grumpy, honest parent (normally written off as “bad”) may be a better parent than a frustrated and resentful parent hiding behind a façade of syrupy sweetness.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“What really matters is being comfortable with your child, making them feel safe and that you want to be around them. The words we use are a small part of that; a bigger part is our warmth, our touch, our goodwill, and the respect we show them: respect for their feelings, their person, their opinions, and their interpretation of their world. In other words, we need to show the love we feel for them when they are awake, not just when they look beautiful asleep.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“But when you feel anger—or any other difficult emotions, including resentment, frustration, envy, disgust, panic, irritation, dread, fear, et cetera—in response to something your child has done or requested, it’s a good idea to think of it as a warning. Not a warning that your child or children are necessarily doing anything wrong but that your own buttons are being pressed. Often the pattern works like this: when you react with anger or another overly charged emotion around your child it is because it’s a way you have learned to defend yourself from feeling what you felt at their age.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“This story begins when Tay’s daughter Emily, who was nearly seven, shouted to her that she was stuck on a jungle gym, that she needed help to get off. I told her to get down and, when she said she couldn’t, I suddenly felt furious. I thought she was being ridiculous—she could easily get down herself. I shouted, “Get down this minute!” She eventually did. Then she tried to hold my hand, but I was still furious, and I said no, and then she howled. Once we got home and made tea together she calmed down and I wrote off the whole thing to myself as “God, kids can be a pain.” Fast-forward a week: we’re at the zoo and there’s another jungle gym. Looking at it, I felt a flash of guilt. It obviously reminded Emily of the previous week too, because she looked up at me almost fearfully. I asked her if she wanted to play on it. This time, instead of sitting on a bench looking at my phone, I stood by the jungle gym and watched her. When she felt she’d got stuck, she held out her arms to me for help. But this time I was more encouraging. I said, “Put one foot there and the other there and grab that and you’ll be able to do it by yourself.” And she did. When she had got down, she said, “Why didn’t you help me last time?” I thought about it, and I said, “When I was little, Nana treated me like a princess and carried me everywhere, told me to ‘be careful’ all the time. It made me feel incapable of doing anything for myself and I ended up with no confidence. I don’t want that to happen to you, which is why I didn’t want to help when you asked to be lifted off the jungle gym last week. And it reminded me of being your age, when I wasn’t allowed to get down by myself. I was overcome with anger and I took it out on you, and that wasn’t fair.” Emily looked up at me and said, “Oh, I just thought you didn’t care.” “Oh no,” I said. “I care, but at that moment I didn’t know that I was angry at Nana and not at you. And I’m sorry.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“Listening to differences and working through them is about understanding and compromise, not about winning. Rather than damning others with judgments, I think our lives would be better if we remained open with curiosity.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Want Everyone You Love to Read: Sane And Sage Advice to Help You Navigate All of Your Most Important Relationships

“The way to make repairs in relationships is first by working to change your responses, that is, to recognize your triggers and use that knowledge to react in a different way.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read:

“Change happens, if it needs to, when we become aware of what we are, not when we try to become what we are not.”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane

“Happiness, like all feelings, comes and goes. In fact, if you were happy all the time, you’d hardly know it, because you wouldn’t have other emotional states to compare it to.”
― Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read: