Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

I forgive my mom for being a psycho and my dad for being a loser.

I'm working on my relationship with my mother and father, but my upbringing has been very destructive.

I like my parents but they are just not good parents. They are nice enough people. I'm not interested in hurting their feelings.

I had a very angry father and was disconnected from my family.

Unfortunately, some parents simply don't love their children. Probably they don't even love themselves. That may be the heart of their problem. Having parents like this is a terrible burden for any child and can shadow him all through life. It can even destroy him.

My mother wasn't any better than my father.

Badmouthing your ex-spouse rips the child apart

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.

If your parents ignored you, or if they are just not emotionally available, or if they yell a lot, that is a type of trauma.

I used to tell my mum to leave my dad when I was, like, nine. I loved my father, don't get me wrong. I really loved him, but he wasn't a good dad, and he wasn't a good husband.

I have no memory at all of my mother shouting at me or at my sister. But I do have horrible memories of my father and the way he behaved. He was so tough on our mother.

I can understand a family that's imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.

My mother ran away from my father after 16 years of being married to him. She was 16 when she hooked up with him. She left him after having six kids.

Reflecting back on my childhood, I know it wasn't functional. It was pretty, pretty dysfunctional, and whose isn't?

Poor parenting may be reflected in poor sibling relationships.

I was so ugly my mother used to feed me with a sling shot.

I got a mother who's very strong after taking the whippings that she took from my father.

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

My dad used to ignore me when I was a kid. He couldn't stand my voice, so he just used to ignore me, and then he'd impersonate me.

We now recognize that abuse and neglect may be as frequent in nuclear families as love, protection, and commitment are in nonnuclear families.

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective.

I grew up in a house of no love or emotion - it kind of sticks with you.

Any son of a dictator, I'm sure, has major issues with their relationship with their father.