Vienna Pharaon > Quotes

“Your inner self knows something about what’s happening, and your reactivity is letting you know that you don’t like what’s going on, that you feel uncomfortable or threatened, or that you’re in danger.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Reactivity is one of the greatest indicators that you have a wound. When you have a strong reaction to something, that reaction is sounding an alarm.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Our wounds and our gifts are next-door neighbors.” What a beautiful reminder that some of our greatest gifts do emerge from the pain we’ve endured.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“True belonging has no hint of arrogance or reactivity, and as Brené Brown says, it is not passive. “[True belonging] is a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Living authentically means that your choices and actions align with your core beliefs, values, and true self. It means that you choose that path even when there are consequences from the world around you.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“And instead of needing to be in control, I learned to trust that someone could lead me without taking advantage of me.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“prioritized child is a child whose needs are seen, understood, and honored. It doesn’t mean that you’re given everything you want or that you’re the focus in every moment. Parents are allowed to have boundaries and say no, and they’re allowed to have a life of their own that they, too, honor and prioritize.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“A prioritization wound leaves you questioning your importance and value to the people to whom you so desperately want to matter.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Instead of trying to get others to change, to take a different path, or to see the suffering they were living in, I acknowledged who they were—and I changed the way I related to their not changing.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“When someone in your family system does something that violates your trust and doesn’t do anything or very little to restore it, then closing off and shutting down might feel like the only option.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Whether you avoid connection and intimacy to protect yourself from being abandoned again, or whether you attach quickly and anxiously in your relationships, the end result is still an absence of authentic connection.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“A chronically distracted and preoccupied family has lasting effects. It’s painful to grow up questioning whether you’re a priority, whether you matter more than those other things that are distracting the adults from paying attention to you. And that experience can come forward with you into your adult relationships, in ways that are both obvious and subtle.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“A well-known quote attributed to Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, author, and psychiatrist, goes like this: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“The two people whom I’d trusted to be my protectors were so busy fighting each other they for a time lost sight of me. I realized I had to create my own safety.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“The things that distract parents from children are at best stressors to that child, and at worst threaten children’s beliefs about themselves and their value in this world. Later in life, the children of chronically distracted parents may consciously believe they are seeking out relationships in which they are a priority. In reality, however, these still-wounded adults wind up unconsciously seeking out dynamics that tend to repeat and support what they learned from their families decades earlier: they don’t matter. If you didn’t feel prioritized in your family system, then you might have a prioritization wound.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“When I first started therapy, I didn’t see any of this. I was convinced that the issue I needed to work on was “improving communication and conflict in my relationships.” I found myself inexplicably at odds with people in all aspects of my life—friends, colleagues, and especially people I dated—but somehow I never traced these different frustrations and struggles back to this inciting incident in my childhood. I survived that, I told myself. I kept the peace.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“It’s interesting how whether you’re in adaptation or rejection mode, you’re still left feeling like you’re on the outside, or at the very minimum, that you can’t be authentically you.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“The way our parents speak to us and the words they use tell us a lot about them . . . but when we’re children, their words tell us the most about ourselves.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“In what ways did you learn to survive through rejection? How has rejection served you? And does it still today? In what ways do you currently operate from a place of rejection, and might you get curious about what that’s protecting you from or blocking you from?”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Instead of being led by fear, insecurity, or unhealed origin wounds, you can put into action the behaviors that support your goals.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“As the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung would say, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Honoring your voice is not dependent on whether another person hears you or not. To honor your voice requires you to hear yourself—always.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“In what ways did you learn to survive through adaptation?”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“It doesn’t matter how much you try to avoid that painful past: how far away you physically move (“the geographical cure,” as psychologist Dr. Froma Walsh calls it) or whether you fully cut yourself off from a harmful family member. There is an internal resolution that must happen if you’re going to heal, and that internal resolution requires an understanding and awareness of the origin wounds that have a tight grip on you.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“There are many possible ways children will respond if their worthiness is being threatened or in question. Some will become perfectionists. Others will aim to please or will become as useful as possible to show that they have something valuable to offer. Some will focus on performance and achievement, believing that if they do well, they’ll be worthy of attention, validation, and celebration. They’ll do everything in their power to make their parents happy, hoping that a happy parent will equate to being a worthy child.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Pivoting As we come to an end, I’d love for you to take a moment to acknowledge how your belonging wound shows up today.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Do you remember that childhood rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? Yeah, it’s BS. They sold us a crock of lies packaged as resiliency. The words hurt. They’re allowed to hurt. Let yourself acknowledge that they hurt.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Dr. John Gottman say, “Behind every complaint there is a deep personal longing.” We criticize and complain about our partners, our family members, even our friends when an emotional need of ours isn’t being met. Instead of standing beside that emotional need, getting to know it, and bringing it forward, we move away from it, become reactive, and make it about the other person.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Maya Angelou famously said, “You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“This is a profound moment of recognition. That when you belong to yourself, meaning you are at peace with yourself, you will simultaneously belong everywhere and nowhere. Everywhere is within you.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love