Real power is acting in your best interests, and your long-term emotional best interests depend entirely on acting according to your deepest values. If you do that, you will feel valuable and powerful at the same time.
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 160
When we are compassionate, we become more realistic in our expectations, less demanding, and more flexible. We are less likely to inflict wounds, hurt feelings, and indulge in recriminations…. When we make the compassionate choice, we enhance the dignity of each individual, which is the very essence of loving them.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 176
The first thing to realize about the terrible Chain of Resentment is that you don’t have to feel it. The experience of resentment is a choice you make.
The second thing to realize is that the Chain of Resentment binds the self more than anyone else. Breaking the chain of resentment means unburdening the self, setting the self free.
No one can just “let go” of resentment. You can resolve resentment only by investing more value in your life. The more you value, the less you will resent. The more compassionate you are, the less you are able to resent.
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 74.
“You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.”
— Joyce Meyer, Battlefield of the Mind, p. 27
Bad thought made freely available is rendered sterile.
— Michael Gorman, quoting Ranganathan in Our Singular Strengths:Â Meditations for Librarians, p. 25
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
The greatest leverage parents have to help and guide children is to form strong, resentment-free emotional bonds with them, based on value, mutual respect, and empowerment.
Empowerment gives someone the right and the confidence to offer solutions to problems that respect the best interests of all involved. In other words, it activates Core Value and motivations to improve, appreciate, connect, and protect.
The trick in empowering children is to get them to come up with solutions that work for them and you. When they come up with the solutions, you avoid power struggles, resentment, and hostility. Most people, including children, like to cooperate, but hate to submit.
Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 51
But if there’s even a little piece of you that thinks you’re not good enough by yourself — if even a small part of you feels you need your gaslighter’s love or approval to be whole — then you are susceptible to gaslighting.
— Robin Stern, The Gaslight Effect, p. 5
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
What matters most to me is that God had that son to begin with. And that he has other sons and daughters like me that he loves and doesn’t want to be parted from. That he loves his children as I love my own daughters, only more so, with a hot, knowing, parental love that says, “Be who you are, but love me back. Only love me back.”
— Patty Kirk, Confessions of an Amateur Believer, p. 8