Kay Bruner > Quotes

“In an addict’s family, nobody wants the addict to feel bad, because when he feels bad, he will use and abuse.  There is enormous effort, on the part of the rest of the family, therefore, to bear the weight of the addict’s happiness and emotional stability. ”
― Kay Bruner, As Soon as I Fell: A Memoir

“While we were in Honiara that January, I got pregnant and I was sick as I never knew it was possible to be sick.  The smell of powdered milk made me throw up.  The smell of bread made me throw up.  The smell of the inside of the kitchen cabinets made me throw up.  For the next four months, I threw up.  Throwing up was my life.  We did not go back to the village as planned, because I was throwing up, though even ships could hardly have made me throw up more.”
― Kay Bruner, As Soon as I Fell: A Memoir

“spent most of my life trying to figure out to be good enough.  Now I had to learn how to be me.  I had to learn that my way of being was acceptable.  In fact, my way of being was beyond acceptable.  God had made me this way on purpose. My way of being was not a defect, a weakness, or something we just had to learn to work around.  It was, instead, a strength, and a resource that our marriage desperately needed.  Our marriage had had a lot of life on the surface, a lot of motion and production, but it badly needed a richer emotional life.  Without that, in the long run, it satisfied neither of us.  I had thought that Andy’s way was the best way, so I had tried to be Andy.  I denigrated and devalued myself as a result.  And that, I came to see, was a constant slap in the face of God, as if He had made me wrong and I had to fix myself. I had to learn to accept and welcome my own true self, the self that feels first and always.  I had to learn that, for me, feeling IS thinking.  When I accept my feelings, I find that they are telling me some kind of truth.  When I start with my feelings, I can follow them down deep into my soul, where Love lives and moves and has its being inside me.  My feelings are valuable, because they are attached to that deep understanding.”
― Kay Bruner, As Soon as I Fell: A Memoir

“Christianity is not primarily a moral code but a grace-laden mystery; it is not essentially a philosophy of love but a love affair; it is not keeping rules with clenched fists but receiving a gift with open hands.”—Brennan Manning”
― Kay Bruner, As Soon as I Fell: A Memoir