Bruno Bettelheim Quotes

It's a painful thing to talk about my childhood. I kind of don't talk about it much.

I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized.

Families in real life don't tend to resolve things neatly.

I think that it would be hard to find a family that didn't have a secret in it somewhere, and sometimes we know about them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we have an inkling that there's something hidden, but I think that it touches everybody's life.

My parents wanted me to solace them for sorrows they denied having had.

Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.

I finally did work out a very good relationship with my father, but it was rough growing up. We had a lot of conflict, and I think it surfaced in many of my works.

My siblings and I kept everything to ourselves, and rather than blowing up in an instant, my family broke apart slowly.

Growing up, I never expressed myself to nobody. I never told nobody when something was wrong.

There's nothing worse than saying the past is in the past, then dragging it into your kid's life.

We all have those times in relationships, whether it's work or personal or family or whatever it is, where there's something that's eating at you and eating at you, and you want to say it to the person that you care about the most, but you're so afraid it's going to destroy everything. Like the fear of destruction keeps one from saying what they want to say - when, in actuality, by not saying it, things get worse. Because it's the entropy, the leak that doesn't get fixed.

One act of violence takes four generations to heal.

My resistance to communication work is because of 15 years with my former wife where we did all this work, but we never got to the core of anything.

We must look to the rising generation for the restoration of the country.

A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

The World is not ours to keep. We hold it in trust for future generations.

The things we ignore often come back to us in our sleep.

Your past is not your past if it's still impacting your present.

I really hate to see abusive behavior being passed on from generation to generation to generation, when we have access to health and counseling.

What you don't want to know about yourself wants to be known, which is why it keeps 'showing up' at your door unannounced!

But just because you bury something, that doesn't mean it stops existing. Those feelings, they'd been there all along. All that time. I had to face it.

That which is denied cannot be healed.

It's a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.

Following a code of silence, you're never gonna lose the anger.