Quotes & Sayings About Acknowledging Pain

The only balm to sorrow is memory; the only salve for the pain of losing someone to death is acknowledging the life that existed before. — Nina Sankovitch

People in Japan and the Faeroe Islands kill dolphins and pilot whales by running steel rods into their spinal columns while they squeal in pain and terror and thrash in agony. (In Japan, it's illegal to kill cows and pigs as painfully and inhumanely as they kill dolphins.) The lack of compassion for dolphins and whales indicates that humans' "theory of mind" is incomplete. We have an empathy shortfall, a compassion deficit. And human-on-human violence, abuse, and ethnic and religious genocide are all too pervasive in our world. No elephant will ever pilot a jetliner. And no elephant will ever pilot a jetliner into the World Trade Center. We have the capacity for wider compassion, but we don't fully live up to ourselves. Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them? We seem so unfinished and so defensive. Maybe incompleteness is one of the things that "makes us human. — Carl Safina

In our inherent contradictions as humans, and in order to validate our own pain, we deny the pain of others. But it is in acknowledging the pain of others that we achieve fully our humanity — Hamza Yusuf

The needs of a wife are nothing like that. A close human bond demands a tolerance, an ability to adjust, to moderate one's own actions and to accept criticism, even unreasonable behavior at times, to listen to all kinds of chatter and hear the real message behind the words. Above all, it needs the sharing of self, the dreams and the fears, the laughter and the pain. It means taking down the defenses, knowing that sooner or later you will be hurt. It means tempering ideals and acknowledging the vulnerable and flawed reality of human beings. — Anne Perry

Your self-worth and self-esteem cannot be changed by doing positive affirmations. If that were the case many people would be super confident and are not. It may appear to work for some, but only because they have already faced the hurts inside that have caused low self-worth and low self-esteem, and are ready to feel differently.

Acknowledging the pain and the suffering that take place inside you, and allowing the feelings, will take time, but this new way of handling these feelings will change the way you relate to you and to the outside world. — Kelly Martin

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only ... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences ... — Doris Lessing

Mothers were meant to love us unconditionally, to understand our moments of stupidity, to reprimand us for lame excuses while yet acknowledging our point of view, to weep over our pain and failures as well as cry at our joy and successes, and to cheer us on despite countless start-overs. Heaven knows no one else will. — Richelle E. Goodrich

For that is the meaning of a farewell in the full, important sense of the word: that the two people, because they part, come to an understanding of how they have seen and experienced each other. What succeeded between them and what failed. That takes fearlessness: you have to be able to endure the pain of dissonance. It is also about acknowledging what was impossible. Parting is also something you do with yourself: to stand by yourself under the look of the other. The cowardice of a farewell resides in the transfiguration: in the attempt to bathe what was in a golden light and deny the dark. What you forfeit in that is nothing less than the acknowledgement of your self in those features produced by darkness. — Pascal Mercier

What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it? — Sontag, Susan

We are intensely loyal to our parents. In spite of the pain we experienced at our parent's hands, we cling tenaciously to their views of life; and their examples of what it is to be a man or a woman follow us throughout life. Acknowledging the power of our loyalty to them, and especially our loyalty to our same-sex parent, is only the beginning of our journey to improve upon their model; but it is at least a first step. — Augustus Napier

dreams at night. Secretly, he began to make plans to travel to the shack the following weekend. At first he told no one, not even Nan. He had no reasonable defense in any exchange that would result after such a disclosure, and he was afraid that he might get locked up and the key thrown away. Anyway, he rationalized such a conversation would only bring more pain with no resolution. "I am keeping it to myself for Nan's sake," he told himself. Besides, acknowledging the note would mean admitting that he had kept secrets from her, secrets he still justified in his own mind. Sometimes honesty can be incredibly messy. Convinced of the rightness of his impending journey, Mack began to consider ways to get the family away from home for the weekend without rousing any suspicions. There was the slim possibility that — William Paul Young

And then I thought that people like to talk about their pain and loneliness but in disguised ways. Or in ways that are sort of organized but not really. I realized that when I try to start conversations with people, just strangers on the street or in the grocery store, they think I'm exposing my pain or loneliness in the wrong way and they get nervous. But then I saw the impromptu choir repeating the line about everyone having holes in their lives, and so beautifully, so gently and with such acceptance and even joy, just acknowledging it, and I realized that there are ways to do it, just not the ones that I'd been trying. — Miriam Toews

decolonization requires acknowledging. that your needs and desires should never come at the expense of another's life energy. it is being honest that you have been spoiled by a machine that is not feeding you freedom but feeding you the milk of pain. — Nayyirah Waheed

The hardest part was acknowledging I might never see you again. Realizing how much you mean to me and how much I'd miss your pretty face every morning and night. Realizing all the things I didn't do with you and might never get a chance to. But I think most of the pain came from the realization that the time we spent together was not enough for me and I couldn't force you to feel the same. — J.C. Reed

On some level, although we can't handle the pain of acknowledging it, Good Friday happens every day. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The essence of this practice is that when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this. It's a way of acknowledging when we are closing down and of training to open up. When we encounter any pleasure or tenderness in our life, we cherish that and rejoice. — Pema Chodron

There are too many people today who instead of feeling hurt are acting out their hurt; instead of acknowledging pain, they're inflicting pain on others. Rather than risking feeling disappointed, they're choosing to live disappointed. Emotional stoicism is not badassery. Blustery posturing is not badassery. Swagger is not badassery. Perfection is about the furthest thing in the world from badassery. — Brene Brown

I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it. — Lupita Nyong'o

Our country has caused tremendous damage and pain to the peoples of many countries, especially Asian countries, through colonial rule and invasion. Humbly acknowledging such facts of history, I once again reflect most deeply and offer apologies from my heart as well as express my condolences to all the victims of the last major war both in and out of the country,. — Junichiro Koizumi

Avoiding fear and pain can cause them to grow stronger. The trick with fear is to go with it, to let it do it's work. Once fear has put us in touch with our inner issue it can diminish. In fact, simply acknowledging fear seems to lessen it. — John Earle