Real personal power comes from focusing on what you can control, from acting in your best interests. You feel empowered when you control how you behave, in accordance with your deepest values.
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 152
You cannot diminish or hurt the parent of your children without diminishing and hurting your children.
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 48
You have an absolute right to be resentful and angry, but exercising that right will only keep the thorns in your heart. You have a more compelling right to heal the wounds you’ve suffered. You can heal with compassion for yourself, with sympathy for your own hurt, and with the motivation to heal and improve. Emotional healing is replacing your core hurts to your core value, so that you can realize your fullest potential as the loving, compassionate, competent, creative person you are meant to be.
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 121
Conviction is for something, like justice and fair treatment, while anger and resentment are against something, like injustice or unfair treatment. Those who hate injustice want retribution and triumph, not fairness; they fantasize about punishment of their unjust opponents, who must submit to humiliation. The fantasies of those who love justice are of equality, harmony, and triumphant good.
Being for something generates energy and creates positive feelings and relationships, while being against something depletes energy, creates negative feelings, and usually has deleterious effects on relationships — if you’re resentful about something at work, you won’t be as sweet to your kids when you get home.
— Steven Stosny You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 117
If you want to feel lovable, the easiest way is to be compassionate to someone — a child, friend, stranger — anyone will do.
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 110
If you choose to heal — and it is certainly your choice — you make the choice out of compassion for yourself, with awareness that your emotional health and well-being are more important than anyone else’s resentment, anger, or abuse.
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 106
The road to psychological ruin begins with blame.
The road to psychological power begins with responsibility.
You cannot blame and find good solutions at the same time. You must choose between blame and making things better.
Blame is always about the past. Solutions must occur in the present and the future.
Blame focuses attention on damage, injury, defects, weakness — on what is wrong. Blame makes you feel like a powerless victim.
Responsibility focuses attention on strengths, resiliency, competence, growth, creativity, healing, and compassion, all of which are necessary for solving family problems.
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 44
“General Rule: If you have to justify your emotions or behavior, to yourself or others, they are almost always harmful.
“The urge to justify should be a trigger to heal the hurt that causes the anger. Justifying anger never heals the hurt that causes it.”
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 39-40.
“We can never feel taken advantage of or exploited in the experience of compassion, for compassion is its own reward. Even if it turns out that someone else’s defenses or weaknesses have motivated manipulation, we have the self-satisfaction of knowing that we acted out of compassion, which is always the right thing.”
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 36
“If you feel devalued by something your partner, child, or parent says or does, he or she probably feels devalued too. Devaluing him or her in return will only make it worse. Compassion will make it better.
“Compassion does not mean giving in. Giving in or ‘going along to avoid an argument’ virtually guarantees resentment. Resentment undermines and ruins attachment relationships.
“Most of the time resolution without resentment is possible with a sincere effort to understand one another. We become the angriest (the most hurt), not when disappointed for not getting what we want, but when feeling misunderstood or disregarded. With compassion, we never feel unimportant or disregarded or unlovable (although we may feel disappointed). This makes negotiation on all issues much easier. Compassion is absolutely necessary for resolution in the event of hurt feelings….
With compassion the goal is not to ‘win’ a dispute, but to find a solution in which all parties feel regarded, important, and valuable.”
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 37