Katherine Mayfield > Quotes

“In dysfunctional families, people overfocus on problems—even very small ones—without allowing any focus on the innumerable ways a child does things well.  This is one of the primary causes of low self-esteem.  A child can do ten, fifty, a hundred things right in a day, but an overly critical parent will pick out the one thing that doesn’t go well, and harp on it over and over.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“And I wonder:  is there a connection between high expectations and confidence, between low expectations and low self-esteem?”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: The Truth Behind the Happy Family Facade

“Criticism is really nothing but one person’s opinion raised to the level of “the way it is.”  It’s designed to control, either through making the criticized person conform, or by making them feel guilty or ashamed.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“As an adult, you have enough knowledge and life experience to take good care of yourself, and you don’t need to blindly follow childhood rules any longer in order to keep yourself safe.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“In functional families, children are encouraged by parents, and as they become adults, they internalize those supportive voices so that the positive messages are with them for their entire lives.  In the same way, those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families internalized the negative, critical voices, which haunt us until we decide we’re not going to listen to them any more.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“Most people in the world will not treat you the same way your dysfunctional family did.  It takes a while to begin to see that the world is different than the family atmosphere.  The more time you can spend thinking about what you want, noticing what situations in the present remind you of the past and releasing the related emotions, and encouraging yourself in what you most want to do, the more quickly you can heal from the past.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“We can’t begin to free ourselves from a trap of seeing life in a certain way or believing certain things unless we realize that we’re in a trap.  Only then can we begin to break free.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“As I began to explore the idea of connecting with and loving the soul of everything I came in contact with, I began to realize that one of the reasons I have never felt very deeply connected with people is that I never learned to love their souls.  In my dysfunctional family, material things, and controlling things and people, were most important.  And in my childhood, protecting myself from emotional pain was primary, because it showed up regularly in the form of shaming and belittling from my parents.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“The way to change your reality to a more positive one is to reach down inside yourself to that smallest, youngest part of you who lives with one foot in your conscious mind and one in your subconscious, and help that “inner child” understand that the way he or she views the world is based on the family dynamics that were in place early in life, but is not necessarily “reality.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“My parents were deeply committed to service in the community – their willingness manifested in their volunteering and giving to others.  But at home, the “struggle against” was pervasive because they never learned in their own dysfunctional families how to nourish themselves and other family members.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: The Truth Behind the Happy Family Facade

“My parents thought I was the Good Little Girl, because that’s who they wanted me to be.  For decades during my adult life, I was a doormat because they had trained me to be totally responsive to other people’s needs with no consideration for my own.  I do enjoy giving to other people, but when it’s required over a long period of time, the joy leaves, quickly replaced by total burnout. I’ve come to realize that I can have a good heart and be deeply compassionate without being a doormat.  And I can give to other people, as long as I give to myself as well.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: The Truth Behind the Happy Family Facade

“What is most important to understand about dysfunctional families is that in keeping the family “secrets,” we are harming ourselves and diminishing our ability to be honest and open-hearted with ourselves and others we care about”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“Children have no frame of reference with which to understand that those rules are simply choices that his parents have made, and that other families and communities will have different styles of relating and behaving.  His focus becomes narrow, he becomes less flexible, and may have trouble as an adult operating outside of the rules set for him by his parents.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“As you begin to see yourself, your family, and the old, outmoded behavior patterns that run your life with more clarity, you’re taking steps to live more deeply from your authentic self.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“My mother told me once years ago that she couldn’t produce enough breast milk for me, possibly because she was over 40, and probably because she smoked.  One of the nurses in the hospital told her that she was starving her daughter.  I’m sure that didn’t make her feel any better! I imagined that wee child, that most vulnerable part of myself, just wanting to fill herself up so she could grow, but not getting enough to feed her hunger.  Not surprisingly, this is how I’ve felt in general for most of my life:  my soul is always hungry. Oh, my fists were balled up as I expressed that horrible frustration that had been locked in my body and brain for 50 years! I lay on my back and kicked my feet, scrunched up my face, howled silently….And, oh, did it feel good to let it go! It took a total of not much more than ten minutes to let it all go, and my sense of relief afterwards was palpable as I went back to what I’d been doing with a renewed sense of vigor and hope.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“If a child grows to adulthood without examining the view of life, self, and the world he or she grew up with, it’s likely that quite a bit of this early “programming” will still affect the adult’s opinion of self and the way in which he or she sees and interacts with the world.  This can sometimes place limitations on how well the person copes with life and what they can accomplish.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“Unspoken rules can go even deeper:  if a child is rarely touched with affection and gentleness, she’ll probably grow up feeling unworthy of affection, and may have difficulty as an adult responding to her own or others’ feelings with kindness and concern. Because those qualities were never demonstrated, they’re not part of her repertoire. Or if a child is not treated with respect, and allowed to express ideas and emotions, he’ll grow up feeling as if he doesn’t really matter, except in terms of how well he can follow the rules and “produce” what’s expected.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“The inner child stubbornly believes that reality is the way it is, because he or she has never known anything different.  The inner child’s concept of reality, developed in the first weeks and months of life, was reinforced over and over and over again for weeks, months, and years.  If the trauma was difficult enough to cause dissociation, then when the person is an adult, the inner child still has no knowledge of how reality can be any different than it was at the time the dissociation began.  This is part of the basis of Complex PTSD.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“You were born with an incredible ability to learn and grow, to develop into a uniquely gifted human being, to fulfill your potential as a distinct and creative individual.  But the beliefs and behavior patterns you learned throughout your childhood years can be holding you back from being the best that you can be, and from creating a fulfilling life for yourself.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“I encourage you to set foot on a journey to a more authentic life, the same journey I wrote about in my memoir, The Box of Daughter: Healing the Authentic Self.  Sharing our stories helps us heal ourselves, and as we share, we begin to heal ourselves, and in doing so, we help to heal the world.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“The only way to truly recover from a dysfunctional childhood and create an authentic life is to face your feelings, acknowledge them, express them freely, and let them go.  Feelings are a normal part of being human, and they’re meant to be fully expressed.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“You might also try making a list of your parents’ values and beliefs, and follow the above procedure, making a list of your own values and beliefs to compare.  If your parents valued a spotless house, do you truly value the same thing, or do you have a different value?  Maybe you’d rather meet your friends and have fun, and clean once a month instead of once a week.  That’s perfectly fine—everyone has different values.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“If a small child’s needs are not met with at least some regularity, there is a tremendous sense of frustration, of powerlessness to get anything that he or she needs.  Over time, as the frustration builds up and is repressed again and again, it becomes too painful to face, and a sense of futility develops.  If it isn’t acknowledged and allowed expression, the frustration will continue to hide under the surface and grow into a feeling of futility.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“This is the way out of helplessness and hopelessness. By following the thread of the anger back to its original source, and allowing the anger to express freely in a healthy manner, a seeker begins to understand why life appears to be the way it is (hint: we learn our worldview by mimicking someone else’s, or we believe what they taught us about ourselves and the world without investigating for ourselves whether it’s true or not).”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: The Truth Behind the Happy Family Facade

“Experiencing a sense of futility can be a way of denying an immense and terrifying buildup of frustration—a well of distress and disappointment at having needs ignored or belittled time after time after time—and it can affect an adult’s relationships, career, and deepest sense of self.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“The reason that taking care of others doesn’t work is that no one knows what another person needs to feel nourished (unless they can tell us clearly and directly, and in dysfunctional families, they usually don’t).  We end up guessing:  “Oh, I think this would help.”  “It seems to me that he needs that.”  But we can’t guess what would truly nourish another person.  He or she may not even know themselves.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: The Truth Behind the Happy Family Facade

“Remember that you can’t fix other people’s problems.  Nothing you do will remove the misery they feel, if they don’t want to let go of it.  Being a scapegoat or whipping post for someone else’s anger, frustration, grief, or misery is really only enabling them to stay in the same old patterns.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with removing yourself from a difficult situation and getting on with your life. I wish you peace and healing.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“As an adult, that child may believe that being depressed is just part of who he or she is, when in fact it could have just been a coping mechanism learned in order to get along, because it was hard to share excitement about something good when someone else was despondent.  When we’re in frequent contact with someone who’s depressed and miserable (or angry, or frustrated), it’s difficult not to pick up their mood, even if it’s not truly a part of who we are. Children may adopt all kinds of character qualities and aspects of their parents’ personalities when they’re not allowed to develop in their own authentic way.  They mimic responses to life situations (one of the ways the “drama addiction” becomes a habit), handling situations in ways that are similar to the way their parents responded.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“Denying so much repressed rage requires tremendous energy—energy that could be used to create an authentic and exciting life.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma

“1.  If all of your time was your own, and you could choose what to do with your hours and days, what are some of the things you’d like to do? 2.  Are there people you spend time with that you would like to leave forever? 3.  Would you like to socialize more in your life?  Less? 4.  If you could have any job you wanted, what would it be? 5.  If you could dress any way you wanted, what would that be? 6.  Do you have a dream of who you really are inside?  If so, what is it, and how would that self express itself?  How would that self live your life? 7.  If you could do anything you wanted to right now, what would it be?”
― Katherine Mayfield, Stand Your Ground: How to Cope with a Dysfunctional Family and Recover from Trauma