Mary Manin Morrissey Quotes

My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.

I have survivor's remorse.

Shame is the root of all addictions.

Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

When my parents died, they both were 47, and they died of complications of different diseases, one being diabetes. I became a diabetic at 17 and went on this road of kind of self-destruction, eating-wise, until I was 40.

I mean, I felt terrible. And in the beginning, I mean, I was completely devastated. I mean, can you imagine the kind of guilt that you would feel, and the responsibility?

After that I couldn't show my face outside. I lost my identity and balance. I was still living with my parents, and they were my only friends. For so many people, this thing with the nurse was confirmation that I must be mad or mentally ill.

Just learning that you have MS is such a devastating shock.

I grew up in a family of secrets; there was a lot of pathology in the family.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in February 2012, and finding that out really messed me up.

I got really, really sick with a horrible disease called transverse myelitis; I lost my legs. I couldn't play anymore. It was a form of multiple sclerosis, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

There must be a reason that these bad things happen to me. I must be dysfunctional. So why would my dad leave? Why would he kill himself? Why would I be violated? And when you're 6-years-old, you can't comprehend that. But as you get much older in life, you begin to think what's wrong with me?

guilt is a pollutant and we don't need any more of it in the world.

He wanted to tell her that everything he had done he had done because he was broken, because watching her die had destroyed him, but there was no way to say it that didn’t sound like he was trying to pin the blame outside himself

The worst pain in the world is shame.

I know that I brought this all on myself. I know that I deserve this. I'd do anything not to be this way. I'd do anything to make it up to everyone. And to not have to see a psychiatrist, who explains to me about being "passive aggressive.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.

When those types of situations[like abuse] begin to occur in your life - I had bought in from a very early age that fundamentally something must be wrong with me.

There are things that can harm a lot more than physically.

Help, I have done it again I have been here many times before Hurt myself again today And the worst part is There's no-one else to blame.

It is the most vicious of all crimes - to be abused by someone you had a relationship with! Because then you blame yourself.

Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.

The human capacity for guilt is such that people can always find ways to blame themselves