Childhood Suffering Quotes

“Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.

But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.

She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.
It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Ne, nisu jučer ubili majku, srušili kuću. Ubili su, babo, moje djetinjstvo, mladost, snove, sav moj život.”
― Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar, Ljubav je Sihirbaz, Babo

“But what happens to the girl with no positive parental examples?
What happens to the girl with the cold mother who
conditioned herself to bury her emotions?
And what happens to the girl with the father who
is an example of who not to marry?”
― LaTasha “Tacha B.” Braxton

“You see the suffering of children all the time nowadays. Wars and famines are played out before us in our living rooms, and almost every week there are pictures of children who have been through unimaginable loss and horror. Mostly they look very calm. You see them looking into the camera, directly at the lens, and knowing what they have been through you expect to see terror or grief in their eyes, yet so often there’s no visible emotion at all. They look so blank it would be easy to imagine that they weren’t feeling much.
And though I do not for a moment equate what I went through with the suffering of those children, I do remember feeling as they look. I remember Matt talking to me--- others as well, but mostly Matt--- and I remember the enormous effort required even to hear what he said. I was so swamped by unmanageable emotions that I couldn’t feel a thing. It was like being at the bottom of the sea.”
― Mary Lawson, Crow Lake

“I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy.”
― Tyler Perry

“Persons in dysfunctional families characteristically do not feel because they learned from a young age that not feeling is necessary for psychic survival. Family members generally learn it is too painful to feel the hurt or to experience the fear that comes from feelings of rage, abandonment, moments of terror, and memories of horror.”
― Kathleen Heide

“Rage swept over her at being young, young and little, as if some evil fairy had put that spell on her. Why must you be locked up in this dreadful cage of childhood for twenty or a hundred years? Nothing in life was possible unless you were old and rich, until then you were only small and futile before your tormentors, desperately waiting for the release that only years could bring.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“An adult seeking validation is a child that did not receive any”
― Srividya Srinivasan

“My classmates find me unceasingly, overwhelmingly comical, and I've gotten used to the clown role and even find a sad comfort in it, because together with my confirmed stupidity, it protects me against their peculiar meanness toward anyone who is different.”
― Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy

“Why is it...that the good things that pop up almost always get clobbered by these miserable darn things that seem to choke out everything like stinkweed?”
― A. E. Hotchner

“I puked rainbows all over my childhood, and it felt so good.”
― L.K. Elliott, Confessions of an Ex Hot Mess

“I know full well what it means to dream. My whole childhood, I begged for a bicycle, and I never did get one.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Czasy secondhand. Koniec czerwonego człowieka

“كان بإمكانه ان يسمع صديقة قديمة من الايام الخوالى، وصوتهابنبرته الرتيبة المستاءة، "تطلب منى ان اذهب معك الى السينما واقول اجل، ثم تغير رأيك وتطلب منى ان نلعب البولنج بدلا من ذلك واقول نعم، لكنك تقول، انتظرى لنؤجلها الى ليلة اخرى، كما لو كان كل شىء يمكنك ان تناله هو شىء لا يتضح انك لا تريده".
ص 253”
― Anne Tyler

“One small boy jumps over a table, pulls his jumper and shirt up, and turns his back to us to show where shrapnel wounded him when he was three. His classmates shriek with laughter.”
― Richard Flanagan, Notes on an Exodus

“Children, Maisie believed, could often only see their world in black and white, never shades of gray—which meant the hard-found forgiveness that provides respite from the dark melancholy of blame might never lift from the soul of a wounded child.”
― Jacqueline Winspear, In This Grave Hour

“I’ve thought of all the times when we could have forestalled damage to the children, but the truth is we were damaged ourselves. Even if we had worked that out, it wouldn’t have been much use. Those early wounds run deep.

Eve had been ignored as a child, controlled but neglected; longing for freedom and longing for affection, she was ridiculously generous with both, and I don’t just mean Martin. She trusted everyone. How would she have recognized cruelty when she was determined to love everyone she met?

Melly swapped one tyrant for another, her father for her husband; it’s hard to know who caused the most damage, especially as she was hell-bent on damaging herself. When you are anorexic, it actually does something to your vision; you can’t assess what you see properly. I heard that on the radio yesterday and I wanted to tell her, but I’m not sure if that would help; not now.

I was damaged by greed: my own. My grandfather told me that anything was possible; it wasn’t his fault that I believed him. I thought I could manage it all – work, marriage, kids, writing, being scared. That was wrong, or worse, half right. He forgot to add that anything is possible, but not on your own. He might have thought that was completely obvious; I grew up in an African village, after all. I should have asked for help when I needed it. He told me to walk slowly and he was right. I might have noticed what was there in front of me. You can’t blame Melly for not seeing things properly, when I wasn’t watching either.”
― Jane Shemilt, Little Friends