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Understanding grows from personal experience that enables a person to see and feel in ways so varied and so full of changeable meanings that one’s self-awareness is the determining factor.
children who were unhappy, each frustrated in the attempt to achieve a selfhood he could claim with dignity — children not understood, but striving again and again to become persons in their own right.
If we want to get closer to the truth we must look deeper into the reasons for our behavior.
We don’t give up easily. We don’t write off a case as “hopeless” without trying just one more thing.
we are not looking for a miracle. We are seeking understanding,
The inquiry goes on and on and we will continue to seek a way out of the wilderness of our ignorance.
What was he thinking about in his lonely little world? What were his feelings? Why did he behave in this manner? What had happened to the child to cause this kind of withdrawal from people? Could we manage to get through to him?
The ingredients of experience would make the room uniquely different for each child.
He brings into this room the impact of all the shapes and sounds and colors and movements, and rebuilds his world, reduced to a size he can handle.
I wanted him to take the initiative in building up this relationship. Too often, this is done for a child by some eager adult.
He needed to develop strength to cope with his world, but that strength had to come from within him and he had to experience personally his ability to cope with his world as it was.
Any meaningful changes for Dibs would have to come from within him.
If the therapy becomes the predominant and controlling influence in the individual’s daily life, then I would have serious doubts as to its effectiveness.
I wanted him to feel and experience his total self in our relationship — and not to confine it to any one kind of behavior. I wanted him to learn that he was a person of many parts, with his ups and downs, his loves and hates, his fears and courage, his infantile desires and his more mature interests.
no one ever really knows as much about any human being’s inner world as does the individual himself; and that responsible freedom grows and develops from inside the person.
things outside ourselves change — and many times we have little control over those elements, but if we learn to utilize our inner resources, we carry our security around with us.
Sometimes it is very difficult to keep firmly in mind the fact that the parents, too, have reasons for what they do — have reasons, locked in the depths of their personalities, for their inability to love, to understand, to give of themselves to their children.
the most rejected and emotionally deprived child he had ever seen. He said that my husband and I were the ones who needed the help. He suggested treatment for both of us.
We have given him everything money could buy, hoping that it would help.
we pulled ourselves together and he said that maybe we had been wrong about Dibs.
There is always an accumulation of experiences intertwined with highly personal emotions, goals, values, that motivate the person and that determine his reaction.
Probably she and her husband had learned early in their lives that their keen intelligences could be erected as a shield around them, could insulate them from emotions that they had never learned to understand and use constructively. Dibs had learned this, too.
It was the lack of balance in his total development that created the problem.
they chose to see Dibs as a mental defective rather than as an intensified personification of their own emotional and social inadequacy.
Her failure to relate to her child with love, respect, and understanding was probably due to her own emotional deprivation. Who can love, respect, understand another person, if they have not had such basic experiences themselves?
And for a while they thought they would get up to the top. And while they thought they could, they were happy.”
But were they changing in their behavior towards Dibs? Or had Dibs changed in his capacity to relate to his mother and father so that he could receive their advances toward him more naturally?
When a child is forced to prove himself as capable, results are often disastrous. A child needs love, acceptance, and understanding. He is devastated when confronted with rejection, doubts, and never-ending testing.
He was a baby when I started to drive him to prove himself to me. Why can’t I let Dibs just be a child? My child! And be glad for him.
So many times a child is not accepted for therapy if the parents refuse to participate and get help for themselves.
it is also true that parents can agree to therapy and be so resistive that little is accomplished. If they are not ready for such an experience, they can seldom profit from it. The defensiveness of a threatened person can be insurmountable.
“He is my father,” he said. “He takes care of me. But I am punishing him for all the things he did to me that made me sad and unhappy.”
he was beginning to build a concept of self that was more in harmony with the capacities within him. He was achieving personal integration.
Perhaps there is more understanding and beauty in life when the glaring sunlight is softened by the patterns of shadows. Perhaps there is more depth in a relationship that has weathered some storms.
We are all personalities that grow and develop as a result of all our experiences, relationships, thoughts, and emotions. We are the sum total of all the parts that go into the making of a life.
I guess Dibs only wanted what we all want on a world-wide scale. A chance to feel worth while. A chance to be a person wanted, respected, accepted as a human being worthy of dignity.”
There are things far more important in this world than a show of authority and power, more important than revenge and punishment and hurt.
A child, given the opportunity, has the gift of honest, forthright communication. A mother who is respected and accepted with dignity can also be sincerely expressive when she knows that she will not be criticized and blamed.
