Danielle’s Reviews > The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture > Status Update

“Ignorance may bring a blissed-out tranquility, but that is not true bliss; on the collective level, it can result in great and wide suffering. We do ourselves and the world a profound service when we endeavor to dissolve our illusions and open ourselves to the truths they conceal.”

Acceptance is not the same as resignation/complacency

“To accept that whatever is currently happening is happening-the simple fact of the matter—does not mean conceding that it should happen.”

“"It's as if your tension is my responsibility, which I have neglected, I get careful around you, as if I'm walking on eggshells. I start feeling depressed, alienated, lonely. I'm left with a lot of resentment, and that's really stressful and frustrating."the woman has to keep him happy. He does not differentiate his anger and his frustration from her—she becomes just an object to him."

“She can conclude either that the people she relies on for love are incompetent, malicious, or otherwise ill-suited to the task, and she is all alone in this scary world; or that she herself is to blame for, well, everything.”

“When experiencing and expressing what we feel threatens our closest relation-ships, we suppress. More accurately, we don't: our mind does that automatically and unconsciously on our behalf.”

“Besides being the bearers of children, they've generally been expected to assuage the psycho-emotional stresses of the men in their lives. Mothering a child may be a mandate from Nature, but mothering a grown man is both unnatural and im-possible. No wonder the father's stress gets outsourced to the mother, at a cost to children and even to the gestating infant”