Karl A. Menninger Quotes

The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

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.

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

I called my mother up and I said, 'You know, I've been to the best doctors in the world and I've spent almost half a million dollars and they're telling me I have symptoms of a P.O.W. and all I did was grow up in your home.'

Sometimes I think we're exposed to things we shouldn't be exposed to too early. I think that sets the tone to a person's whole life. Trauma.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

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

There is a psychic cost children bear when they grow up in fear.

I think anybody who has been abused as a kid - and I was abused as a kid, by various people - will say it's irrational because violence is irrational.

What distresses me at times is that I meet a lot of people in their 40's, 50's, 60's, who still say they're a victim of child abuse.

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

Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.

Kids who don't have moms suffer a lifetime.

We do a disservice to society if we ignore the evidence which shows that stable families tend to be associated with better outcomes for children.

The truth is this: Brutalized, victimized children invariably will brutalize and victimize when they grow up. Is our only response to this the certain promise that we will penalize them when they do? Or will we commit to keeping our children safe from brutality and victimization?

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.

I think that's like the age-old psychological core issue for any situation. Anybody who has had an experience with a parent that is absent, it's going to manifest.

It's crazy how people just don't care sometimes about the kids they have.

Childhood trauma is the rocket fuel for addictive pathology, and this fundamental truth is laid bare in 'Patrick Melrose.'

We have a pandemic of childhood trauma.

Since I was probably eight years old, just about everyday, all the way until I was 14 or 15 years old, just about everyday my mom and my stepdad would roll around in the living room fighting.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

So you grow up with those messages, "You're a failure, you embarrass me, that's why I dress you in dark colors etc." or even when parents commit suicide, the child may think they were a failure as a child causing that. The majority of those people who weren't loved turn to drugs and alcohol and suicide.