Meg Josephson > Quotes

“I honor my needs and communicate them with compassion. I am not responsible for managing other people's emotions.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Multiple conflicting truths can exist at the same time. You can be grateful for what your parents could give you emotionally and feel grief for what they couldn't. You can have empathy for what your parents have gone through themselves, for the trauma they must have survived, and feel angry that you experienced what you did. You can acknowledge that your parents did their best with the awareness and resources they had at the time and acknowledge that their best still really hurt you.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“The experience of what we're feeling is real, but the thoughts surrounding those feelings aren't always true.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“When conflict is constantly brushed under the rug, though, the person who decides to lift up the rug and address the issues—the person who’s healing—is naturally going to have a harder time believing their own experiences because no one else is there to say, “Yeah, that did happen, and what you’re feeling makes sense.” The child who’s called “dramatic” is made to feel like they’re the problem, but really, they’re often just the one communicating the problem that others aren’t willing to look at.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

“Perfectionism is the enemy of self-discovery.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“I am allowed to feel this emotion. Nothing is wrong with me for feeling this. I acknowledge my emotions and allow them to move through me.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“We can start healing when we stop trying to get our pain validated by the people who caused us harm. So often we look for external validation from those who aren't emotionally capable of seeing the pain they caused and may never be capable of doing that in his lifetime.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Conflict is a natural part of life. I am capable of tolerating the discomfort of conflict.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Moving forward isn't synonymous with "getting over it" or shoving aside your emotions. It means allowing yourself to see and hold the pain in ways that you wish the other person could. It means moving forward while feeling the loss. It's not getting over the loss so that you can move forward; it's moving forward with the feeling of loss, soothing it whenever it arises.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Just because it's a thought doesn't mean it's the truth. These thoughts are not me—I am the observer of them.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“There’s grief in realizing that you shouldn’t need to beg to have a close relationship with your parent.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

“this loneliness is masked by hyperindependence, a deep-rooted belief that you need to handle everything on your own, that it’s unsafe to ask for help or rely on others, because you had to be your own parent when you were so young.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

“This hypervigilance carries over into emotional monitoring, which means we’re constantly scanning other people’s emotional states to gauge what they may be feeling so that we can adapt.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

“I was an adult and I was still walking around with a constant feeling that I was about to get into trouble. I was an adult and I still assumed other people’s bad moods were automatically my fault, and that I was personally responsible for managing and “fixing” their emotions.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

“the family dynamic revolves around keeping the most dysregulated and dysfunctional person happy.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

“Healing this loss means seeing your parents objectively, realizing that their pain and emotional distance were never your fault and their patterns aren't proof that something is wrong with you. No child can be "good enough" to earn a functional childhood when their parents are in so much pain of their own and are stuck in their own unprocessed trauma. The causes and conditions that have led us here aren't our fault, but our healing is our responsibility.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“People often think that mindfulness is escapism, a way to leave reality. But mindfulness is really providing us with the ability to be with reality. Mindfulness trains us to deal with what life throws at us with a sense of inner stability instead of turning away from it.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“A key idea in Buddhism is that worrying about or fixating on a scenario gives us a false sense of control. Fawners often are waiting for the worst-case scenario to occur and have trouble believing it when good things happen, because they have always needed to be on guard.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“It’s funny how so much of healing and “finding ourselves” as adults is really just returning to who we were as children before society got its grip on us, before we were taught to feel shame for being ourselves, before we were taught that our needs were too much.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

“The scared part isn't something to get rid of; it's a part of you that's starving for love and acceptance. If you don't soothe that inner voice, the need to soothe and protect it will never go away.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Grief doesn't go away—it's part of my body's topography, like rivers and creeks craved into me—but it morphs and changes and moves from the foreground to the background, then to the foreground again.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Women in particular are conditioned to overextend, overexplain, overapologize. We’re caretakers. Nurturers. Peacekeepers. We’re taught to be good girls, cool girls, to agree with everything and everyone, and to give Uncle Richard a big hug, for goodness’ sake, even if he makes us wildly uncomfortable. We’re taught to not be too much or want too much, so we learn to get used to being unsatisfied with our lives. We’re taught to meet everyone else’s needs before our own, and along the way we lose the opportunity to get to know who we really are, what we need, what we like and prefer.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

“If that scared part of you, that harsh inner voice, is a younger version of yourself, then relating to that part of yourself with shame and hatred means that you're replicating the cycle that was modeled for you. If you're screaming at the scared part of yourself, wishing it would go away, of course it's still scared. It's being treated as it has been all along.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“The mind wants to get pulled into the details of the thoughts in an attempt to figure them out. Put that urge down for a second and practice simply noticing that you were thinking.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“There's no such thing as doing mindfulness "wrong," because it's simply a practice of paying attention, of noticing what's happening right now.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Remember, fawning has been an unconscious survival response. All we can do is thank this protective part of ourselves for taking care of us for so long and cultivate the skills and awareness to move forward with a deeper understanding of it.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Underneath the need to control is discomfort. By fixating, we put off looking at and feeling the uncomfortable emotions that linger beneath the surface. On the other side of that discomfort is freedom. It's time for you to start trusting your future self to carry you through difficult situations—your future self has always gotten you through before.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“In any sort of conflict, whether it's a parental wound or a nasty breakup, we often wait for an external cue (an apology, an acknowledgment, tears with snot) to begin our healing. What I like to remind clients, and myself, is that people can meet us only as far as they've met themselves.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Growing up with emotionally neglectful or immature parental figures can be confusing, because you might have all your physical needs met and still feel empty.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“My core beliefs have shifted away from 'Everything is my fault' and closer to 'Everything is working out. I am worthy of being loved. I am safe.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?