Lucy McNamee

“Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

“Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.”
― Steven Wright

“Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama...you may be running from yourself.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.”
― Gabor Maté