Gia⁷

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“This subconscious belief can – and does – often lead to children repressing their own emotions or needs in the mistaken conviction that they are unlovable and unlikeable if they are struggling. This learned, erroneous behaviour from the past can become a huge trigger for us as adults, when our own children misbehave, because somewhere deep inside us is a lost child crying for attention, but one who has learned to repress their needs. When our own children act in a similar needy or dysregulated way, it triggers us not only because of their needs, but because of our own past needs, too.”
― Sarah Ockwell-Smith, How to Be a Calm Parent: Lose the guilt, control your anger and tame the stress - for more peaceful and enjoyable parenting and calmer, happier children too

“Our parents and caregivers are as much products of their own upbringings as we are; the only difference is that we live in a culture and time now that is aware of childhood trauma, so we can be the generation to break the cycle. Our parents and caregivers weren’t so lucky.”
― Sarah Ockwell-Smith, How to Be a Calm Parent: Lose the guilt, control your anger and tame the stress - for more peaceful and enjoyable parenting and calmer, happier children too

“Our inner voices and the words that ultimately leave our mouths when we respond to our children, particularly in times of heightened emotions, are often subconscious memories of the way we were spoken to as children.”
― Sarah Ockwell-Smith, How to Be a Calm Parent: Lose the guilt, control your anger and tame the stress - for more peaceful and enjoyable parenting and calmer, happier children too