Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them Quotes

“Denying or repressing strong emotions doesn't eliminate them. Instead, they get displaced or stored up.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Because children are totally dependent on their parents for their physical and emotional survival, their need for parental love is absolute. The normal need for bonding with the parent becomes more intense if the parent withdraws love and becomes a figure of fear and anxiety. The more frightening the parent, and the more he threatens to pull away, the more fiercely the child will cling to him in an effort to regain the parent's goodwill. To the confused child, the angry parent, who both loves and hurts, is a giant. This giant controls the child's life through the use of fear and the manipulation of love. The child must be constantly designing her behavior either to avoid the parent's wrath or to get the parent's approval.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“As children, because of our dependency, we experience a sense of being powerless in a world of powerful people. If our home environments are unpleasant or painful, we defend ourselves by secretly promising ourselves that when we grow up we will do things better than our parents did. However, because we know only what we learned as children, as adults we continue to seek out experiences and relationships that offer the comfort of familiarity. So, despite our heroic promises to do things differently, we often end up duplicating our childhood situations and relationships.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“When a child is subjected to verbal attacks, she sees it not as something being done to her but as something she has caused by her own failings. Because children cannot conceive that their all-powerful godlike parents can do anything wrong, they believe what their parents say. The parent's negative opinion becomes the fact on which the child bases her self-image. If the messages the child gets about herself are primarily positive, her self-image will be healthy. But for many children, the positive messages are constantly being canceled out by negative ones.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“We all need to say what we think and feel. When we block the normal channels of expression, the emotions find other ways to manifest themselves. Some of those manifestations can be very destructive. When a woman in a misogynistic relationship disowns her angry feelings, they often return disguised as illnesses. For many women, suffering is the only way they know to express their rage.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“When a girl is sexually abused, layers of secrecy and shame are added to her self-blame. The incestuous aggressor always projects the guilt for his crime onto the child he is molesting. The girl then learns to see herself as dirty and worthless. Having accepted humiliation, and exploitation as the conditions of survival during childhood, the girl is likely to reenact that same abuser/victim relationship with men in her adult life.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“It is behavior, not words, that has the greatest impact on a child. When a mother tells her daughter not to allow a man to control her or abuse her and then models the opposite in her own relationship with her husband, the girl will respond only to the behavioral message, not the verbal one.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Many people are frightened to take a look at the forces that shaped their characters and their backgrounds, believing that the past should be buried and that looking back might mean wallowing in self-pity and old wounds. But self-discovery can open up exciting new choices and options for us. The more we understand what shaped us as individuals, the more tools we have to free ourselves from behaviors that no longer work for us.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Repressed rage can be one of the major sources of stress to the body. In fact, it can actually begin to wear the body out. Rather than deal with their unacceptable rage at their partners, many women unconsciously redirect their anger inward, back onto themselves. The more a woman does this, the more internal damage she is likely to do to herself.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Children from high-drama households often grow up with the idea that tension is an integral part of love. Therefore, the girl who grows up in a high-drama family is an ideal partner for the charismatic, explosive misogynist. The fighting, the tension, and the drama are "normal" and familiar to her. She views the swings from despair to joy, from love to hate, from abuse to intense lovemaking as proof of love.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Anger is a normal human emotion and all children experience it to some degree, but many parents have difficulty dealing with it. Often they mistakenly see their children's anger as an indication of their failure as parents. When a child throws a tantrum, most parents believe that they have lost control, and they feel helpless. Children need to express their angry feelings, but within reasonable limits. They must be taught that the feelings of anger are all right but that this doesn't mean that they child may kick the dog, hit someone, or break things. When a parent teaches a child how to ventilate her feelings in appropriate ways, he teaches a very important lesson.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“A relationship in which one partner can express hostile feelings but the other cannot is based on a serious imbalance of power. Yet, the woman who sees herself as powerless in such a relationship is not seeing things as they really are. She actually has more power than her partner, because he is far more dependent on her than she is on him. She just doesn't realize it. His neediness, his fears of abandonment, his need to be in total control, his intense possessiveness, and his distorted view of reality make him a paper tiger. No matter how powerful he appears, he feels powerful only when he is subjugating and controlling her. These defenses give him a sense of safety but also keep him locked into a very rigid way of behaving. In contrast, once the woman learns to accurately assess her real strengths, she is in a much better position than he is to change her behavior and her life.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“The more compliant she is, the more her feelings and needs are ignored, the angrier the girl becomes, and then the more compliant she becomes in order to deal with the anger. This cycle is the track that every mistreated child runs.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“The messages we receive as children become the core information we use about ourselves and our position in the world for the rest of our lives. Often, however, we do not consciously realize that this information even exists. One of the greatest benefits of reexamining our backgrounds is that we discover what messages we got from our parents. Although this discovery process is painful, it assists us in our efforts to change our current behavior and even our feelings about ourselves. Messages, after all, are learned; any anything we learned can be unlearned.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“When we are children our families take care of our basic survival needs; they are also our first and most important sources of information about the world. It is from them that we learn how to think and feel about ourselves and what to expect from others. Our emotional foundations are created by the ways in which our parents treated us, the ways in which they treated each other, the kinds of messages their behavior communicated to us, and the ways in which we handled that information internally.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Inherent in his fear of this dependency is the equally dreadful fear that she will leave him. His terrors of being alone, of being unable to cope, and of being overwhelmed by an insatiable neediness all grip him again. Chronologically he is an adult, but psychologically he is still a frightened child.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Once she believes his version of the relationship—that he is "good" and she is "bad," that he is "right" and she is "wrong," that her deficiencies are the cause of his blow-ups, and that he is acting this way only because he is trying to help her become a better person—she has stepped into a dangerous twilight zone of distorted perceptions. Accepting his version of reality means she must give up hers. It's Alice in Wonderland time. She may still know that she is being mistreated, but she invents "good reasons" to explain it away. What makes this transition so destructive to her is that she actually has begun to help him to abuse her. She suspends her own good judgement, joins him in his persecution of her, and finds explanations to justify his behavior.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“What makes a woman vulnerable to mistreatment at home, no matter how well she functions outside, is the belief that her need for her partner's love is the most important thing in her life. The prizes of success, financial gain, status, and prestige pale in comparison to that need. In addition, our true natures and weaknesses generally become obvious only in our intimate relationships. The faces we put on for the outside world may have little to do with how we feel about ourselves, how we expect to be treated, and what we will accept from our partners.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“When I first began working in this area, I was startled to learn that while people who were physically abused by their fathers or father-figures were angry at their abusers, they were often far angrier at their mothers for not protecting them and for allowing the abuse to continue. They saw themselves as sacrificial lambs, and their mothers as passive, weak, and unwilling to take a stand against the abuser on their children's behalf. Many women in such situations comfort themselves by saying, "I didn't do anything, so how can I be guilty?" However, when a woman stands by or looks the other way when her children are being brutalized, she becomes a silent partner in the abusive behavior. Her children come to view her as an accomplice to the crime being committed against them. Any physical violence against children is a crime.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Föräldrakärlek är den enda kärleken där det slutliga målet måste vara skillsmässa.

En mor som sätter värde på sonens strävan efter oberoende och uppmuntrar honom att skiljas från henne när han behöver det ger honom mycket viktiga verktyg för att handskas med livet. När modern är villig att låta sonen etablera sin egen identitet genom att låta honom ta risker på egen hand och låta honom göra sina egna misstag, och ändå finns till hands om han skulle behöva henne, bidrar hon till att skapa en människa som har förtroende för sig själv och sin förmåga.

Den förkvävande modern hindrar och begränsar i stället sonens utveckling genom att styra honom för mycket och få honom att känna sig oduglig och hjälplös.”
― Susan Forward, Män som hatar kvinnor och kvinnorna som älskar dem

“The more we understand what shaped us as individuals, the more tools we have to free ourselves from behaviors that no longer work for us.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“It's a mistake to think that if we don't remember or don't acknowledge painful experiences they will just disappear. In fact, great damage is done to us by those phantoms and pieces of memories that swim around in the unconscious, the part of us that never forgets. Unpleasant experiences gain power over us by being denied or hidden, but they can be made to relinquish that power when they are brought out in the open.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“A woman may believe that because she is suffering she has the right to be taken care of and to be pitied; most important, she may view it as justification for not taking any action to make her life better. However, suffering doesn't change anything. Backdoor, indirect attempts to communicate are never effective because they don't confront the issues. Also, the misogynist is rarely sensitive to his partner's feelings. If he does recognize that his partner is suffering, his attitude is liable to be that it has nothing to do with him. The woman's suffering is considered further evidence of her deficiencies. If she breaks down physically or emotionally, it may only add to his contempt for her weakness. In his eyes, she becomes pathetic as well as deficient.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“When a child is not permitted to express her pain, one of the important, destructive messages she gets is that if she is feeling bad it is due to her own deficiencies. Coupled with this is likely the message that if she needs comfort, then she is ugly and repulsive to others.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Boys are encouraged to siphon off a great deal of aggression and anger through contact sports, fighting, and overt competitiveness, but girls are given far fewer outlets. Girls are expected to be polite and sweet-tempered; it is not considered "ladylike" for them to express anger by yelling, fighting, or engaging in aggressive sports. Although some girls become tomboys, most girls learn to ventilate their anger through verbal aggression. Gossiping, name-calling, and sarcasm are the standard forms; other, less direct forms include sulking, pouting, and crying.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Even after we grow up, many of us continue to believe that we have little control over our lives. We may see others as the decision-makers in our lives and come to view life as something that happens to us. This belief system, reinforced by childhood identification with mothers who model extreme dependency and helplessness, set many women up for abusive marriages.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“Society has traditionally reinforced the idea that girls are inferior to boys, that girls can't take care of themselves, and that women need men to take care of them. We've all seen men portrayed in the media as stronger, more competent, and smarter than women, while women are often portrayed as highly emotional, indecisive, scatterbrained, passive, illogical, manipulative, and even malevolent. Such stereotypes further damage a young girl's ability to see herself as a strong and worthwhile person. Coupled with these views is the disparity between the accomplishments for which boys are admired and those for which girls are admired. While girls may be praised for their manners and appearance, boys are often praised for academic achievements and physical strength. Girls may also be discouraged from exploring and mastering life and encouraged instead to develop skills to manipulate others to negotiate in the world for them. What these girls are getting are lessons in helplessness.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“While every parental behavior sends out a message of some kind, it is only the repetitive themes that form the child's picture of the world. If a girl sees her mother accepting physical abuse as well as psychological abuse, she learns that there are no limits to what a man is allowed to do to a woman. A battered woman demonstrates to her daughter that a woman must tolerate anything in order to hold on to a man.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“It is a fear that must be defended against at all costs. In an effort to quell his anxiety, he tries to gain control over his partner by destroying her self-confidence, so that she can never leave him and he will be safe.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why

“In addition to the picture of women as evil is the impossible cultural model of manliness that boys are expected to emulate. This model requires that a man be powerful, independent, invulnerable, in charge, and nonemotional. Certainly he must never be afraid of or dependent on women. No man can live up to this model because it doesn't allow for normal human emotions and needs. It is particularly unrealistic for the man whose childhood circumstances left him with a desperate neediness for a woman's love.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why