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Tell me tales of thy first love— April hopes, the fools of chance; Till the graves begin to move, And the dead begin to dance. —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, The Vision of Sin
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. —C. S. LEWIS, A Grief Observed
Freud’s writings about grief and loss. And he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or else you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia—and we call depression.
As a therapist, she knew a baby’s first sense of self comes through its parents’ gaze. We are born being watched—our parents’ expressions, what we see reflected in the mirror of their eyes, determines how we see ourselves.
We can’t take part in therapy if we feel unsafe. Boundaries make us feel safe. Boundaries are what therapy is about.”
Boundaries, by definition, are the first thing to go when a child is abused.
“It was written” is the Greek expression. Meaning, quite simply, from that moment on, their destinies were sealed.
The temple was dedicated to Demeter, goddess of the harvest—goddess of life—and to her daughter, Persephone—goddess of death. The two goddesses were often worshipped together, two sides of the same coin—mother and daughter, life and death. In Greek, Persephone was known simply as Kore, meaning “maiden.”
The Iliad with ‘μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος’—‘Sing to me, O goddess, of the menis of Achilles.’”
I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; ’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all …
My argument with so much of psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering. —ARTHUR MILLER
“It doesn’t take much to save a childhood.” A little kindness, some understanding or validation: someone to recognize and acknowledge a child’s reality—and save his sanity.
