Eamon Dolan > Quotes

“Alice Miller argues that “unquestioning adulation of parents and ancestors, regardless of what they have done, is required not only by some religions, but by ALL of them, without exception.”
― Eamon Dolan, The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement

“Almost immediately after my last call with my mother, I realized that I had finally done what we should all have license to do: We should all hold our family to the same standards that we hold our friends. I would never let a friend treat me for one week the way my mother treated me for forty years. None of us should be imprisoned by the cosmic lottery that placed us in an abusive home. We owe our abusers nothing. We didn’t ask to be born among them, and they did us no favor by conceiving us or sharing our genes. It is immoral for anyone—abusers, bystanders, institutions—to expect loyalty to family from anyone who has survived family abuse. The only way relatives can earn our loyalty is by treating us with love and empathy.”
― Eamon Dolan, The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement

“I was hoping for a work that could do for family abuse something like what Melody Beattie’s classic Codependent No More did for its subject.”
― Eamon Dolan, The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement

“Family violence in all its forms knows no borders of class or race, and neither does the denial of this evil. People of every demographic and political stripe insist that “family matters,” “blood is thicker than water,” and whatever other catchphrase they might invoke to suggest that a shared gene pool or a shared roof should make us consider felonies committed against us to be misdemeanors. We inhabit a world where people are routinely expected to eat dinner with their rapist, to pick up groceries for their assailant, or to show their tormentor how to use Spotify.”
― Eamon Dolan, The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement

“If you can’t talk to me without being mean, then we just can’t talk to each other anymore.”
― Eamon Dolan, The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement

“Hmph! I suppose I have to watch every word I say to you!”
― Eamon Dolan, The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement