Clara

“Memories, monsters, they are in our blood, and theirs are the faces we find staring back at us in broken mirrors.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“Nature has a funny way of deceiving. The weak always think they’ve got a chance at survival. But the world burns in the end, and all things fade to ash.”
― Jesse Nolan Bailey, Defilement and Other Stories

“Time and space float and dissolve like sugar in wine. You are already dead, even though you haven’t yet been born. You’re nothing but a drop on the tip of your father’s crooked cod, a sigh in your mother’s sore throat. And yet the worms are standing in line, waiting for their feast to fester. Why should you dread your death?”
― Andre Solnikkar, Pestilentia Innamorata

“Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child’s brain.
Repeated messages of disdain are internalized and adopted by the child, who eventually repeats them over and over to himself. Incessant repetitions result in the construction of thick neural pathways of self-hate and self-disgust. Over time a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing. The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes the equivalent of full-fledged self-abandonment. The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated.
With ongoing parental reinforcement, these neural pathways expand into a large complex network that becomes an Inner Critic that dominates mental activity. The inner critic’s negative perspective creates many programs of self-rejecting perfectionism. At the same time, it obsesses about danger and catastrophizes incessantly.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving