Pauline > Pauline's Quotes

“There's a reason for everything. Every human behaviour, every human thought, every human emotion, every human reaction - doesn't matter what it looks like on the outside - reflects a desire to be loved or to love. And as Marshall Rosenberg who teaches Non-Violent Communication said "very often we make these communications..." he calls it a "the tragic communication of a need". So that it doesn't matter how people behave or speak, underneath it there is a basic human need. That human need was at some point frustrated in their early development. And that person has been all their life trying to have that need met, doesn't matter how they behaved. Even if they behaved in the most agressive and inhuman and obnoxious fashion, there's always a reason for it. So that means when somebody comes for help, then you have to see that need and that real human being underneath the words and underneath the behavior. In other words, you have to see the person more clearly than they see themselves. Not so that you can deliver your opinion to them and have them accept it, but so that you can mirror them back to their true selves.”
― Gabor Maté

“All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma. Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It has meaning in every single case.”
― Gabor Mate

“What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. What seems nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through. If people are addicted to self-soothing behaviours, it's only because in their formative years they did not receive the soothing they needed. Such understanding helps delete toxic self-judgment on the past and supports responsibility for the now. Hence the need for compassionate self-inquiry.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No

“Strong convictions do not necessarily signal a powerful sense of self: very often quite the opposite. Intensely held beliefs may be no more than a person’s unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

“Couples choose each other with an unerring instinct for finding the very person who will exactly match their own level of unconscious anxieties and mirror their own dysfunctions, and who will trigger for them all their unresolved emotional pain.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.”
― Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

“Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“There is only one immutable truth: No being is purely individual; nothing comprises only itself. Everything is composed of foreign cells, foreign symbionts, foreign thoughts. This makes each life-form less like an individual warrior and more like a tiny universe, tumbling extravagantly through life like the fireflies orbiting one in night. Being alive means participating in permanent community and continually reinventing oneself as part of an immeasurable network of relationships.”
― Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology

“I started to learn then that nature is not a place that shields us from feeling; rather, it is a refuge where we can experience our true emotions. Plants and animals help us discover significant things about ourselves. In them, we find our own inwardness.”
― Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science

“To practice the process of conflict resolution, we must completely abandon the goal of getting people to do what we want.”
― Marshall B. Rosenberg

“Analyses of others are actually expressions of our own needs and values.”
― Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

“Anger is a result of life-alienating thinking that is disconnected from needs. It indicates that we have moved up to our head to analyze and judge somebody rather than focus on what we are needing and not getting.”
― Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan Watts

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

“You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”
― Brene Brown

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare.”
― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“Here’s what I believe: 1. If you are offended or hurt when you hear Hillary Clinton or Maxine Waters called bitch, whore, or the c-word, you should be equally offended and hurt when you hear those same words used to describe Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, or Theresa May. 2. If you felt belittled when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables” then you should have felt equally concerned when Eric Trump said “Democrats aren’t even human.” 3. When the president of the United States calls women dogs or talks about grabbing pussy, we should get chills down our spine and resistance flowing through our veins. When people call the president of the United States a pig, we should reject that language regardless of our politics and demand discourse that doesn’t make people subhuman. 4. When we hear people referred to as animals or aliens, we should immediately wonder, “Is this an attempt to reduce someone’s humanity so we can get away with hurting them or denying them basic human rights?” 5. If you’re offended by a meme of Trump Photoshopped to look like Hitler, then you shouldn’t have Obama Photoshopped to look like the Joker on your Facebook feed. There is a line. It’s etched from dignity. And raging, fearful people from the right and left are crossing it at unprecedented rates every single day. We must never tolerate dehumanization—the primary instrument of violence that has been used in every genocide recorded throughout history.”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone