Tuly

“Researchers have found that by the time a boy is seven months old, he can tell by his mother’s face when she’s angry or afraid. But by the time he’s twelve months old, he’s built up an immunity to her expressions and can easily ignore them. For girls, the opposite happens.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think

“People can forgive toxic parents, but they should do it at the conclusion—not at the beginning—of their emotional housecleaning. People need to get angry about what happened to them. They need to grieve over the fact that they never had the parental love they yearned for. They need to stop diminishing or discounting the damage that was done to them.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma. Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It has meaning in every single case.”
― Gabor Mate

“In this way she perpetuated the pain she had experienced as a child. Not unexpectedly, her enormous accumulated rage had to find a way out, but since she was afraid to express it directly, her body and her moods expressed it for her: in the form of headaches, a knotted-up stomach, and depression.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life