Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“When snow melts, what does it become?'
It becomes water, of course'
Wrong! It becomes spring!”
― Natsuki Takaya

“If you're feeling helpless, help someone. ”
― Aung San Suu Kyi

“Explaining justifying or defending a boundary can be distracting, emotionally (and physically) draining and weaken resolve. If someone is so busy explaining why a boundary is valid, they may not be aware of how their boundary is being chipped away at. Or, if a person is defending a boundary and can’t come up with a reason why their boundary is “good” or reasonable, they may not know how to maintain it.”
― Cristien Storm, Living in Liberation: Boundary Setting, Self Care and Social Change

“Repeating a directive can also help keep focus on what the other person is doing in response to a boundary, rather than on defending, explaining or justifying the boundary. Being aware of what the other person is saying and doing informs how one responds to the other persons response to the boundary. The person might be saying one thing and doing another, which is helpful to recognize.”
― Cristien Storm, Living in Liberation: Boundary Setting, Self Care and Social Change

“Believing that it is acceptable to walk away, halt, interrupt, stop, redirect and end an interaction is critical to boundary setting and boundary heath.”
― Cristien Storm, Living in Liberation: Boundary Setting, Self Care and Social Change

“Often, too, we have unconscious beliefs about what we can expect of other people and their capabilities or behaviours – these are ‘limiting expectations’. Limiting expectations play themselves out just as powerfully as limiting beliefs. This happens when we unconsciously treat people the way we expect them to be, and they in turn unconsciously meet that expectation by behaving in that way. Or else we unconsciously meet others’ unspoken expectations.”
― Judy Klipin, Life Lessons for the Adult Child: Transforming a Challenging Childhood

“Adult children – not having a good idea of what ‘normal’ is – tend to guess a lot of the time. They guess at what is expected of them, they guess at what they can expect from others. To be effective and to feel effective in the workplace, adult children need to learn to ask what is expected of them.”
― Judy Klipin, Life Lessons for the Adult Child: Transforming a Challenging Childhood

“Unfortunately, premature forgiveness strands us in relationships with our parents that are as devoid of genuine warmth and intimacy as ever. Unless we work through the unresolved fear and hurt our parents caused us, we will always be uneasy around them and hold them at an emotional distance. This is commonly the case even when they have outgrown their abusive ways.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Why didn't my mother see it? Why didn't she stop it? Why did she always blame me? Why did I always blame her? But it has always been easier to blame women, a string of lies tied to an apple. No one blames Adam for taking a bite of his own volition. No one blames God for the harshness of the punishment. Eve always pays for the sins.”
― Louise M. Wisechild, The Obsidian Mirror: Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse

“In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

“Years as a healer and trauma therapist have taught me that trauma isn’t destiny. The body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and joy, and where we process most of what happens to us. It is also where we do most of our healing, including our emotional and psychological healing. And it is where we experience resilience and a sense of flow.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

“Recent studies and discoveries increasingly point out that we heal primarily in and through the body, not just through the rational brain. We can all create more room, and more opportunities for growth, in our nervous systems. But we do this primarily through what our bodies experience and do—not through what we think or realize or cognitively figure out.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

“A key factor in the perpetuation of white-body supremacy is many people’s refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance and, invariably, prolong the pain.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

“There’s a way out of this mess, and it requires each of us to begin with our own body. You and your body are important parts of the solution. You will not just read this book; you will experience it in your body. Your body—all of our bodies—are where changing the status quo must begin.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

“Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt, the founder and director of the Center for Loss & Life Transition, affirms the wisdom in choosing to be present to the energies of sorrow. There’s no need to reign in the chaos of grief; no need to “impose order.” Wolfelt advises us to listen rather than lecture, companion rather than “treat” the bereaved.”
― Amy Wright Glenn, Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go

“Grief isn’t something to manage efficiently. It’s not an illness. There’s nothing pathological about mourning. Furthermore, anyone who has been torn asunder by loss knows that prior normalcy is never regained. Our very bones and sinews are transformed. We are irrevocably changed after the passing of those we love. How could we not be?”
― Amy Wright Glenn, Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go

“I think that the ones who speak cruelly or taunt are the ones who should be pressured to change. I have no delusions about myself. In a physical fight, Trist would best me easily. And, having won it, he would then use that superiority to justify however he treated me afterward. He is saying that my physical condition should determine how he treats me. And you think that because you have bested him in a physical struggle, you have proved something to him. But you haven’t. All you have done is shown that you agree with him, that the man who can physically defeat another is the man who should make the rules. I don’t agree with that. If I attempt to live by those rules, I will be beaten, and I do not intend to be beaten. So I will not be goaded into a physical confrontation with Trist or anyone else. I will win another way.”
― Robin Hobb, Shaman's Crossing

“I suppose I cannot blame you for doubting me. I could scarcely believe it myself at first. I found all sorts of ways to deny it and explain it away. But it wouldn’t stay gone.”
― Robin Hobb, Shaman's Crossing

“Only a crazy man could have made any sense of the events. I did not want to be crazy, and so I could not think seriously about these things or permit them to have meaning in my life.”
― Robin Hobb, Shaman's Crossing

“All of this suggests that one of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression. In contrast, when we don’t address our trauma, we may pass it on to future generations, along with some of our fear, constriction, and dirty pain.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

“Anger is a life-supportive response intended to impact an unsupportive environment. For”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Caring requires paying attention, seeing, listening, responding with respect. Its logic is contextual, psychological. Care is a relational ethic, grounded in a premise of interdependence. But it is not selfless.”
― Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance

“For the woman who has not hidden the hag within herself, that darkness at the centre of the soul is a magical sanctuary. In Druidry, we speak of it as a nemeton deep within the soul, a place of exquisite peace and natural healing. Indeed, it is often referred to as a great dark cauldron; it is only when a woman is able to sit, balanced and grounded, upon the three feet of that inner cauldron, that she is able to find the strength of her soul’s creativity, an ancient and bottomless pot containing that infinite universal darkness, this is the great cauldron of myth and legend, and mumbling beside it is her inner hag who, like Cerridwen, the old witch goddess of the sickle moon, stirs her brew of transformative inspiration.”
― Emma Restall Orr, Kissing the Hag: The Dark Goddess and the Unacceptable Nature of Woman

“But I couldn’t tell him that fear surged in me, chilling my hands and stealing my breath. I couldn’t tell him how tiny I was, how insignificant I felt against the immense, whirling power coming to bury us.”
― C.L. Polk, Stormsong

“There would be blood spilled again, across worlds and worlds, there might be war, or plague. And the universe would need them to do what small good things they could, even in the face of that which they could not stop. If all they could be were small rocks to break the current, it would have to be enough.”
― Lina Rather, Sisters of the Vast Black

“I sometimes think that I don’t let myself know what I’m really thinking about. That doesn’t make much sense but it makes sense to me. I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we’re thinking about things that we don’t know we’re thinking about—and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we’re like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That’s what dreams are.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Your aunt Ophelia took the words I don’t belong and wrote them on her heart. It took her a long time to take those words and throw them out of her body. She threw out those words one letter as a time.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Your aunt Ophelia took the words I don’t belong and wrote them on her heart. It took her a long to time to take those words and throw them out of her body. She threw out those words one letter at a time. She wanted to know why.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World