They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

by Oliver James

Offspring of families with five or more children are significantly more likely to be delinquent and to suffer mental illness.

‘Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.’

is not only the likes of Mia Farrow who find themselves reliving the past – all of us do. In fact, the extent to which we repeat our childhood experiences is quite extraordinary. How we react to our friends as well as who we pick as a lover, our abilities and interests at work, in fact almost everything about our psychology as an adult is continually reflecting our childhood in our day-to-day, moment-by-moment experience.

when we meet someone new we impose preconceptions upon them based on our c...

we even get these people to behave in the ways we were used to back then. Whether we were seen as the sweet, lovable one or the black sheep of the family, we go out and find people who see us that way.

each person needs the other’s madness.

Dysfunctions in the right brain have now been linked to numerous mental illnesses.

Our first six years play a critical role in shaping who we are as adults, physically and psychologically.

Insight is not the same as self-pity.

Of course, that isn’t easy. T.S. Eliot was spot on when he wrote that ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’. We are insulated from it by a rose-tinted bubble of positive illusions, believing that friends like us more than they really do and that nasty things are less likely to happen than is actually the case. We dress up the past to suit the present.

your destiny has not been programmed into your genes.

a large gap created less need for the laterborn to reject the status quo in order to get parental attention.

identify a niche.

Where girls are firstborn they are prone to be more masculine, especially so if their siblings are all girls because they identify more strongly with their fathers.