Emotional Regression Quotes

I have an intense desire to return to the womb. Anybody's.

The problem is simply this: no one can feel like CEO of his or her life in the presence of the people who toilet trained her and spanked him when he was naughty. We may have become Masters of the Universe, accustomed to giving life and taking it away, casually ordering people into battle or out of their jobs . . . and yet we may still dirty our diapers at the sound of our mommy's whimper or our daddy's growl.

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.

I often meet adults in their 30s, 40s, or 50s who, as soon as they recognize me, suddenly become six years old again.

Well, I don't know if this is true of everyone, but I have this relationship with my parents where, despite however mature or articulate or grown-up I think I've become, as soon as I go home, I turn into this petulant 13-year-old, especially with the tone of my voice.

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

When you are surrounded by children, the child in you comes back.

I always have felt that I was six years old.

The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.

Do you know anyone who would - secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self - really prefer to return to childhood?

The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.

Games are a trigger for adults to again become primitive, primal, as a way of thinking and remembering. An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals, that's all. I am not creating a game. I am in the game. The game is not for children, it is for me. It is for an adult who still has a character of a child.

Adults under threat feel like children.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

In your life there's peaks and valleys and sometimes we regress, and we don't even know we regress. You just have to learn how to accept all of your mistakes and learn to love yourself again.

I'm pretty shy when I go home because I was pretty shy growing up, and I think I go back to that person.

I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

Does everyone turn into a truculent thirteen-year-old when they go home, or is it just me?

Sorrow makes us all children again.

It's like, no matter what I do, I always feel like I'm five years old, and I end up in the back of my father's car looking out the window, and nothing has changed in 25 years.

I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream

Whenever you want something that you're not going to get, suddenly the whiney 3-year-old comes out in you.

We are all somebody's children, and when we're in pain, we regress, instinctively looking to our parents to make everything better.