Are You Mad at Me? Quotes

“I honor my needs and communicate them with compassion. I am not responsible for managing other people's emotions.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Multiple conflicting truths can exist at the same time. You can be grateful for what your parents could give you emotionally and feel grief for what they couldn't. You can have empathy for what your parents have gone through themselves, for the trauma they must have survived, and feel angry that you experienced what you did. You can acknowledge that your parents did their best with the awareness and resources they had at the time and acknowledge that their best still really hurt you.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Perfectionism is the enemy of self-discovery.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Conflict is a natural part of life. I am capable of tolerating the discomfort of conflict.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“I am allowed to feel this emotion. Nothing is wrong with me for feeling this. I acknowledge my emotions and allow them to move through me.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“The experience of what we're feeling is real, but the thoughts surrounding those feelings aren't always true.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Just because it's a thought doesn't mean it's the truth. These thoughts are not me—I am the observer of them.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Moving forward isn't synonymous with "getting over it" or shoving aside your emotions. It means allowing yourself to see and hold the pain in ways that you wish the other person could. It means moving forward while feeling the loss. It's not getting over the loss so that you can move forward; it's moving forward with the feeling of loss, soothing it whenever it arises.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“We can start healing when we stop trying to get our pain validated by the people who caused us harm. So often we look for external validation from those who aren't emotionally capable of seeing the pain they caused and may never be capable of doing that in his lifetime.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“When conflict is constantly brushed under the rug, though, the person who decides to lift up the rug and address the issues—the person who’s healing—is naturally going to have a harder time believing their own experiences because no one else is there to say, “Yeah, that did happen, and what you’re feeling makes sense.” The child who’s called “dramatic” is made to feel like they’re the problem, but really, they’re often just the one communicating the problem that others aren’t willing to look at.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“this loneliness is masked by hyperindependence, a deep-rooted belief that you need to handle everything on your own, that it’s unsafe to ask for help or rely on others, because you had to be your own parent when you were so young.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“There’s grief in realizing that you shouldn’t need to beg to have a close relationship with your parent.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“This hypervigilance carries over into emotional monitoring, which means we’re constantly scanning other people’s emotional states to gauge what they may be feeling so that we can adapt.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Women in particular are conditioned to overextend, overexplain, overapologize. We’re caretakers. Nurturers. Peacekeepers. We’re taught to be good girls, cool girls, to agree with everything and everyone, and to give Uncle Richard a big hug, for goodness’ sake, even if he makes us wildly uncomfortable. We’re taught to not be too much or want too much, so we learn to get used to being unsatisfied with our lives. We’re taught to meet everyone else’s needs before our own, and along the way we lose the opportunity to get to know who we really are, what we need, what we like and prefer.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“People often think that mindfulness is escapism, a way to leave reality. But mindfulness is really providing us with the ability to be with reality. Mindfulness trains us to deal with what life throws at us with a sense of inner stability instead of turning away from it.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“The scared part isn't something to get rid of; it's a part of you that's starving for love and acceptance. If you don't soothe that inner voice, the need to soothe and protect it will never go away.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“If that scared part of you, that harsh inner voice, is a younger version of yourself, then relating to that part of yourself with shame and hatred means that you're replicating the cycle that was modeled for you. If you're screaming at the scared part of yourself, wishing it would go away, of course it's still scared. It's being treated as it has been all along.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“A key idea in Buddhism is that worrying about or fixating on a scenario gives us a false sense of control. Fawners often are waiting for the worst-case scenario to occur and have trouble believing it when good things happen, because they have always needed to be on guard.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Healing this loss means seeing your parents objectively, realizing that their pain and emotional distance were never your fault and their patterns aren't proof that something is wrong with you. No child can be "good enough" to earn a functional childhood when their parents are in so much pain of their own and are stuck in their own unprocessed trauma. The causes and conditions that have led us here aren't our fault, but our healing is our responsibility.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Grief doesn't go away—it's part of my body's topography, like rivers and creeks craved into me—but it morphs and changes and moves from the foreground to the background, then to the foreground again.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“the family dynamic revolves around keeping the most dysregulated and dysfunctional person happy.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“I was an adult and I was still walking around with a constant feeling that I was about to get into trouble. I was an adult and I still assumed other people’s bad moods were automatically my fault, and that I was personally responsible for managing and “fixing” their emotions.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“It’s funny how so much of healing and “finding ourselves” as adults is really just returning to who we were as children before society got its grip on us, before we were taught to feel shame for being ourselves, before we were taught that our needs were too much.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Clear, direct communication reduces long-term suffering, even if it brings about short-term discomfort, because it cuts through and addresses the situation that’s right in front of us. If our efforts to make everyone else happy are making us really unhappy, we’re not on a sustainable path.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“In Buddhism, three marks of existence—anicca, anatta, and dukkha—define our human reality. The Buddhist teacher Ruth King translates these characteristics of life as nothing is personal, nothing is permanent, and nothing is perfect.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Fawning disconnects us from our bodies, and so does living in a society that teaches us to be at war with our bodies—to shrink, make ourselves smaller and slimmer, so we won’t be able to take up enough space to fulfill our potential. We’re lured into a world of detachment from our bodies to increase the profit of companies that thrive off our self-loathing. It’s an act of rebellion against the system when you become embodied—in harmony with your body, nurturing it and accepting it in all its seasons, cycles, and fluctuations—because that means you don’t need to be smaller, younger, or different to have value. It means you have value right now, as you are.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“We resist an emotion that’s inherently temporary and is trying to pass through us, and we end up prolonging the emotion by trying to control it.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“If you were able to achieve it, then it must not be that important or have been that hard, leading you to constantly undervalue your milestones. Nothing is enough for the inner critic who’s trying so hard to find safety through perfection. Achievements may bring a sense of relief instead of joy, because those achievements were merely an obligation, another milestone you had to complete to continue to prove yourself.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“Anytime someone would compliment her dad, Morgan would feel viscerally angry, but she couldn’t show it. When a child sees their parent exhibit two completely different sides, the child internalizes the belief that something is wrong with them because they get only the “bad” side and no one else does. A child thinks: If other people see my parent as so warm and kind, why do I feel so hurt by them? It must be me; it must not be that bad. I must be bad to make them act so mean. Anger is part of the grieving process, but so many of us have been taught to believe that anger is bad, so we never fully grieve. If you only ever witnessed anger in extreme ways growing up, you learned: Anger = unsafe. I must avoid anger at all costs, avoid conflict and disagreements. Anger is something to be feared. And when you felt anger growing up, how was it handled? For many of us, anger was punished or dismissed, or we were told not to feel it. So from that we learned: Anger = bad, and when I feel anger, something is wrong with me for feeling it. But anger, as we’ll explore in chapter 5, is a natural, healthy”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?

“A key component of fawning is something called hypervigilance, which is a state of heightened awareness in which the nervous system is extremely alert to potential danger or threat—whether there’s an actual threat or not. In this state of alertness, the brain is continuously scanning the environment to find the threat.”
― Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?