Elizabeth Berg Quotes

I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

I grew up with an extremely abusive father. As a mother, I wanted to protect my own children from exposure to violence. When I found out one of my daughters was in an abusive relationship, it broke my heart. Finally, she left him ?- but only after his abuse started spreading to the children.

I was exposed to violence while I was still in the womb - my father punched my mother in the stomach while she was pregnant with me.

Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

My Papa's Waltz: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

When you're in a broken family and your role model is a violent male, boys grow up believing that's the way they're supposed to act. And girls think that's an accepted way men will treat them.

I did not realize how broken I was until I saw how broken Mama was.

Never marry a man who hates his mother because he'll end up hating you.

Relationships are so much a rerun of our parental relationships. We're rerunning the relationship they were in together and we're rerunning the relationship we had with them with our lover.

My mother's feeling about men in general were always a bit of a mystery to me. She had difficulties in Puerto Rico with the men in her life. Her brothers abused her. It's very easy to be judgmental, but more often than not, there are mitigating circumstances, and children are not usually aware of those.

There are some men who enter a woman's life and screw it up forever.

Homophobia, racism, and sexism are all rooted in the same oppression that causes a group of people to internalize the oppression they've experienced and then continue the cycle of abuse. Simply put, hurt people hurt people.

In the Dolezal family, you couldn't always count on your parents to keep you safe.

My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.

My father and mother separated when I was two months old.

My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it’s faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.

If you constantly beat yourself up with negative thoughts, you will either beat up on the people around you- verbally, emotionally, or physically- or you will beat up on yourself by destroying some area of your own life.

The pattern often has been entrenched since childhood... [abusive people] don't think that there is anything wrong with them because that is the way they were brought up in their family.

There were lots of nightly relationships. But the reason you don't want to make a commitment is not that you're such a freewheeling, adventurous person, it's because you're scared shitless that it will turn out like your mother and father.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

Seeing your mother naked is not something you easily recover from. Seeing your mother naked and jumping from one side of a king-sized bed to the other with a nurse's hat on while your father, who is also naked, is chasing her with a bandanna around his neck, is reason to put yourself up for adoption.