Childhood Relationships Quotes & Sayings

I am done looking for love where it doesn't exist. I am done coughing up dust in attempts to drink from dry wells. — Maggie Young

It isn't surprising if, as adults, when we first start to form relationships, we should devotedly go off in search of someone who can give us the all-encompassing, selfless love that we may once have known in childhood. Nor would it be surprising if we were to feel frustrated and in the end extremely bitter at how difficult it seems to be to find; at how seldom people understand what we need or care to help us properly. — Alain De Botton

Relationships are not additive, but multiplicative because you connect with his/her childhood experiences, past relationships, thoughts on money and more. — Valerie J. Lewis Coleman

Since I spent much of my childhood being left behind and ignored, one might think that, as an adult, moments of perceived abandonment would feel old hat. The truth is, as an adult, I am always waiting to be left behind. I'm always ready to be discarded and, therefore, I spend a significant amount of time preparing for this eventuality.
I lower my expectations, I don't seek out meaningful relationships, and I don't engage in any sort of real intimacy, physical or otherwise.
Engage is the key word here. Except, when I engage, when it happens, when I'm left behind it doesn't feel old hat. It feels like it did the first time and it takes me by surprise. So, I don't let it happen. — Penny Reid

One of the most astounding dynamics in human relationships is how the unconscious intuition of our brain's right hemisphere is able to act as radar to find us just the right person to provoke and recreate our childhood attachment relationship ... I've given much thought to the question of why we are designed to be drawn -like a moth to a flame- to the very person who is most likely to resurrect all our childhood anguish. It seems like a cruel hoax to play on two wounded souls. — Charlette Mikulka

I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think. It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It took becoming a man to realize how lucky I'd been. It took a few hard knocks in life to make me realize the only thing my dad had ever wanted or worked for was to give me a chance at being better than him. — Tucker Elliot

The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other's truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love. — Bell Hooks

Be nice to your children. They may grow up to be writers. — Katerina Stoykova Klemer

No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom of childhood, in short, FOR SHEER GRATUITOUS MISERY-PRODUCING POWER this influence stands alone. — Henry Drummond

My mother was obviously never there to take the blame she deserved. She left me to absorb it all in her place. She was far too busy in her own world, that incidentally revolved around herself. I'm pretty sure she dated a new guy every few months for most of my childhood. Some would last longer and show up again later after disappearing for a while, like the last day of a cold or flu before you start feeling better. — Ashly Lorenzana

They say adolescent 'best' friendships are like love affairs where we learn the rules of relationships: commitment, trust, loyalty, jealousy, exchange, loss. Not being acquainted with the theories of friendship, Charles and Lise chose each other out of good humoured envy. Each wanted the life of the other. — Barbara Wels

When Uncle W. G. held out his hand to take my money, I dropped the dead mouse in his hand. — Earl B. Russell

We take the most difficult relationship of our childhood... and we MARRY it. — Rick Cormier

Wounded parents often unintentionally inflict pain and suffering on their children and these childhood wounds causes a laundry list of maladaptive behaviors commonly called codependency. These habits restrict people to love-limiting relationships causing much unhappiness and distress. — David W. Earle

Why do you speak like we won't meet again for such a long time?"
"Because we didn't, for such a long time, — Sapan Saxena

Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father.

It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows. — N.K. Jemisin

He was seven years old the summer that his life ended. He'd always felt like his life was taken the moment that truck rammed into his father and sister. Or at least, the life he would have had was ended before it even began. — Melodie Ramone

Time grants a unique perspective which allows us to see events through a filter of accumulated wisdom. — Christopher Earle

Family is not disparate relationships between individuals and machines, in separate rooms of a house. Childhood is not a race to accumulate all of the consumer goods and stresses of adulthood in record time. Simplification signals a change and makes room for transformation. It is a stripping away that invites clarity. — Kim John Payne

How we perceive, feel about and respond to people and situations is far more guided by the lessons of early childhood than we would like to believe. We may be adults, chronologically and physically, but too often the youngest parts of our personality are invisibly, yet actively, living our lives. — Charlette Mikulka

We change our attitudes, our careers, our relationships. Even our age changes minute by minute. We change our politics, our moods, and our sexual preferences. We change our outlook, we change our minds, we change our sympathies. Yet when someone changes hir gender, we put hir on some television talk show. Well, here's what I think: I think we all of us do change our genders. All the time. Maybe it's not as dramatic as some tabloid headline screaming "She Was A He!" But we do, each of us, change our genders. In response to each interaction we have with a new or different person, we subtly shift the kind of man or woman, boy or girl, or whatever gender we're being at the moment. We're usually not the same kind of man or woman with our lover as we are with our boss or a parent. When we're introduced for the first time to someone we find attractive, we shift into being a different kind of man or woman than we are with our childhood friends. We all change our genders. — Kate Bornstein

I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas - of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn't had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding. — Nicole Krauss

Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it. — Gavin Maxwell

Like Jocelyn, Survivors often think: * That's just the way I am
* I'm not lovable, that's why I keep having disastrous relationships
* I'm not very clever, that's why I didn't do well at school
* I'm a loner
* I'm a weak person
* I'm not very nice
* I was a difficult child
Many survivors find it difficult to accept that being sexually abused as a child can continue to affect them many years later. It may seem too fantastic, or too frightening an idea to believe.
David Finkelhor, an American researcher, has tried to explain how sexual abuse affects a child and leads to long-term problems. He suggests four ways in which childhood sexual abuse causes problems:
1 Traumatic Sexualization
2 Stigmatization
3 Betrayal
4 Powerlessness — Carolyn Ainscough

Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together. — Maxine Hong Kingston

The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel, and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity. — Emily Bronte

If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don't think it's the children who need to be adjusted. — Stefan Molyneux

Understand the nature and influence of repeating patterns, from childhood experiences or even from past lives. Wthout understanding, patterns tend to repeat, unnecessarily damaging the relationship. — Brian L. Weiss

I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it's easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin' man and the loner. — Steve Martin

Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not 'smash their mommy' and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle. — Bell Hooks

How do you know if your inner voice or sense of guidance is your deeper-self speaking its wisdom, your unconscious childhood programming, or the voice of your Aunt Matilda? Discerning the difference between an automatic response stemming from family beliefs, childhood distortions, or culture, and guidance from our connection with our higher/deeper self, makes life, success, and relationships so much easier. — Jennifer Howard

So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault & responsibility of the adult. I was - and am - innocent. The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis — Ellen Bass

The child is right," she announced firmly.
Arrietty's eyes grew big. "Oh, no-" she began. It shocked her to be right. Parents were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arrietty knew, and enjoy saying it-knowing always they were safe and wrong. — Mary Norton

Although the typical abusive man works to maintain a positive public image, it is true that some women have abusive partners who are nasty or intimidating to everyone. How about that man? Do his problems result from mistreatment by his parents? The answer is both yes and no; it depends on which problem we're talking about. His hostility toward the human race may sprout from cruelty in his upbringing, but he abuses women because he has an abuse problem. The two problems are related but distinct. — Lundy Bancroft

When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing. — Rebecca Solnit

Women's childhood relationships with their fathers are important to them all their lives. Regardless of age or status, women who seem clearest about their goals and most satisfied with their lives and personal and family relationships usually remember that their fathers enjoyed them and were actively interested in their development. — Stella Chess

Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser; of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse. — Stefan Molyneux

When you're hurt very badly in your childhood, the area that it has the greatest effect on is relationships. Once you feel like you can't trust people, once you feel like that they don't care about you, that they're really not going to take care of you, it gets very difficult in relationships. — Joyce Meyer

A lot of the characters I play have problems, they are marginalised, they have serious psychological problems, problems with relationships, with childhood. These are big subjects, big subjects. You can't balk at work like that. As an actor, that's as good as it gets. — Robert Carlyle

It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more 'herself' with her 'true' friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did. — Liane Moriarty

I have sometimes said to a client: "If you are so in touch with your feelings from your abusive childhood, then you should know what abuse feels like. You should be able to remember how miserable it was to be cut down to nothing, to be put in fear, to be told that the abuse is your own fault. You should be less likely to abuse a woman, not more so, from having been through it." Once I make this point, he generally stops mentioning his terrible childhood; he only wants to draw attention to it if it's an excuse to stay the same, not if it's a reason to change. — Lundy Bancroft

I believe, when in my behavior or in relationships or in the way I react to something, that I'm still dealing with some leftover stuff from my childhood, but the good thing is now, because I have learned so much from the Bible, I can tell when I'm behaving wrong and when I'm not, and it doesn't take me very long to realize that's out of fear, or that's because I was controlled as a child, and I can make a conscious decision to behave the way I know I should behave. — Joyce Meyer

Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know that you're avoiding them. — Jodi Picoult

I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships. — Tommy Rettig

The first person I knew who died was Beth March. I cried for three days. — A. Louise Robertson

I cannot overemphasize the impact our childhood has on our ability to be honest because we live out what we learned as children in our adult relationships. — Cortney S. Warren

Survivors of trauma may have difficulty initiating relationships ... — Asa Don Brown

What we learned about love and relationships from our childhood feels normal. But just because something feels familiar doesn't mean it is healthy. Spend five minutes today quietly reflecting on one of your relationships. Does it enrich your life? If you find that it doesn't, consider what changes you need to make so the relationship feeds you. — Judith Hanson Lasater

The more basic reason is that the human being gets his original experiences of being a self out of his relatedness to other persons, and when he is alone, without other persons, he is afraid he will lose this experience of being a self. Man, the biosocial mammal, not only is dependent on other human beings such as his father and mother for his security during a long childhood; he likewise receives his consciousness of himself, which is the basis of his capacity to orient himself in life, from these early relationships. These important points we will discuss more thoroughly in a later chapter - here we wish only to point out that part of the feeling of loneliness is that man needs relations with other people in order to orient himself. — Rollo May

Family relationships trigger childhood wounds, and those wounds often trump our rational thinking. We can't 'rationally' transcend the kind of primal pain that such relationships can arouse. — Marianne Williamson