“I’m convinced that we use resentment and anger to punish loved ones, not so much for their behavior as for the pain we feel from our reflections in the mirror of love. In other words, it’s what we take their behavior to mean about us that causes us distress, resentment, and anger.”
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 48
“It is far easier, it seems to me, to become a cynic than it is to work beyond disappointments and rise above wounds. We must be willing to trust again and expect better than we’ve received. True cynics who believe they have become experts at seeing through people have actually succumbed to a different kind of blindness. If we want love, it is better to look for the good in people, even if it means being somewhat of a cock-eyed optimist.”
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 81
“We feel crazy because we are lying to ourselves. We feel crazy because we are believing other people’s lies. Nothing will help us feel crazy faster than being lied to. Believing lies disrupts the core of our being. The deep, instinctive part of us knows the truth, but we are pushing that part away and telling it, ‘You’re wrong. Shut up.'”
— Melody Beattie, Codependent No More, p. 123
“Codependents cannot change until we accept our codependent characteristics — our powerlessness over people, alcoholism, and other circumstances we have so desperately tried to control. Acceptance is the ultimate paradox: we cannot change who we are until we accept ourselves the way we are.”
— Melody Beattie, Codependent No More, p. 121
“Who we are right now is okay. In fact, codependents are some of the most loving, generous, good-hearted, and concerned people I know. We’ve just allowed ourselves to be tricked into doing things that hurt us, and we’re going to learn how to stop doing these things. But those tricks are our problems; they are not us. If we have one character defect that is abhorrent, it is the way we hate and pick on ourselves. That is simply not tolerable nor acceptable any longer. We can stop picking on ourselves for picking on ourselves. This habit is not our fault either, but it is our responsibility to learn to stop doing it.
“We can cherish ourselves and live our lives. We can nurture ourselves and love ourselves. We can accept our wonderful selves, with all our faults, foibles, strong points, weak points, feelings, thoughts, and everything else. It’s the best thing we’ve got going for us. It’s who we are, and who we were meant to be. And it’s not a mistake. We are the greatest thing that will ever happen to us. Believe it. It makes life much easier.”
— Melody Beattie, Codependent No More, p. 112-113
“In the history of humankind, no one has ever felt more lovable by hurting someone he loves.”
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 41
“To love adequately, you have to tolerate feeling inadequate.”
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 40
“The more loving experiences we have, the more we have to bring with us when we focus on a deep, intimate relationship. The quality of love is not strained when it is shared; rather it is intensified and most assuredly improves with the experience.”
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 77
“Perhaps we would feel less frustrated if we could accept the fact that on this earth there is no perfect love, only human love. Then we could expend our energies appreciating and enhancing the love we have.”
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 75
“Trying to keep ourselves from experiencing a particular emotion in the first place is an even bigger mistake than trying to fight it once we are aware of it. When we attempt to preempt it, we risk hiding the emotion rather than letting it go. Unseen, the thought behind the feeling continues to operate, but with far more power than before.
“If a destructive emotion were just a set of physical sensations, then perhaps we could will ourselves to ignore it, like we sometimes will ourselves to ignore a backache or ‘fight’ a cold. But an emotion is the symptom of a thought, and attempting to block the emotion is ignoring the thought that’s causing the feeling….
“We must expose the thought that is producing the emotion, and we must expose what we’re doing to empower and retain that thought.
“If we can clearly see that we don’t believe the thought behind a particular emotion, we have the option of replacing it with a more natural, restful, and self-affirming mental activity. If we want to end the vicious cycle of using our minds to torture ourselves, uncovering the thought behind our first wave of emotion is fundamental.”
— Hugh Prather, The Little Book of Letting Go, p. 60-61