Terry Phillips

“We will martyr ourselves, suffering under the weight of a non-reciprocal relationship until some part of us bursts in protest. Suddenly, we lose our mind, and allowing ourselves to heap all manner of nastiness, name calling, patronizing, death threats on the “deserving” jerk who has it coming after all we do for him/her! As the final insult rings across the room and we regain consciousness, we are horrified by what has come out of our mouth. After all, we LOVE these people, and we quickly move into anxious terror that this time we have gone too far . . . this time we crossed the line and they will leave us. So, we hunker back down and the martyrdom begins again. It’s a terrible cycle.”
― Mary Crocker Cook, Awakening Hope. A Developmental, Behavioral, Biological Approach to Codependency Treatment.

“They say that people are innately afraid of those who need them, they say that people are afraid of "clingy-ness", afraid of attachment, afraid of being needed by another. But I beg to disagree. I believe that people, when looking at someone who is needy of them, see themselves and see their own fears and they go away because they can't handle those fears; it's their own neediness that they're afraid of! They're afraid to want and to need, because they're afraid of loss and of losing, so when they see these things in another, that's when they run away. Nobody is actually running away from other people; everybody is really running away from themselves!”
― C. JoyBell C.

“We insist on being Someone, with a capital S. We get security from defining ourselves as worthless or worthy, superior or inferior. We waste precious time exaggerating or romanticizing or belittling ourselves with a complacent surety that yes, that’s who we are. We mistake the openness of our being—the inherent wonder and surprise of each moment—for a solid, irrefutable self. Because of this misunderstanding, we suffer.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“The essence of bravery is being without self-deception.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times