Dysfunctional Families Quotes

“All of this makes me realize that my parents never knew me.  They never really knew who I was.  They only knew the picture of who I was that they’d helped me create in response to their needs.  How sad it is to think that these people who knew me for 50 years, who had given me life, never really knew who I am.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“As I began to explore the idea of connecting with and loving the soul of everything I came in contact with, I began to realize that one of the reasons I have never felt very deeply connected with people is that I never learned to love their souls.  In my dysfunctional family, material things, and controlling things and people, were most important.  And in my childhood, protecting myself from emotional pain was primary, because it showed up regularly in the form of shaming and belittling from my parents.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“My mother told me once years ago that she couldn’t produce enough breast milk for me, possibly because she was over 40, and probably because she smoked.  One of the nurses in the hospital told her that she was starving her daughter.  I’m sure that didn’t make her feel any better! I imagined that wee child, that most vulnerable part of myself, just wanting to fill herself up so she could grow, but not getting enough to feed her hunger.  Not surprisingly, this is how I’ve felt in general for most of my life:  my soul is always hungry. Oh, my fists were balled up as I expressed that horrible frustration that had been locked in my body and brain for 50 years! I lay on my back and kicked my feet, scrunched up my face, howled silently….And, oh, did it feel good to let it go! It took a total of not much more than ten minutes to let it all go, and my sense of relief afterwards was palpable as I went back to what I’d been doing with a renewed sense of vigor and hope.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“The inner child stubbornly believes that reality is the way it is, because he or she has never known anything different.  The inner child’s concept of reality, developed in the first weeks and months of life, was reinforced over and over and over again for weeks, months, and years.  If the trauma was difficult enough to cause dissociation, then when the person is an adult, the inner child still has no knowledge of how reality can be any different than it was at the time the dissociation began.  This is part of the basis of Complex PTSD.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“The way to change your reality to a more positive one is to reach down inside yourself to that smallest, youngest part of you who lives with one foot in your conscious mind and one in your subconscious, and help that “inner child” understand that the way he or she views the world is based on the family dynamics that were in place early in life, but is not necessarily “reality.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“What all of this means for people who’ve grown up in dysfunctional families or traumatic or abusive situations is that the world they live in—the reality they inhabit—is very different from the world of people who have been cared for, supported, and loved.  This is why people who have grown up in supportive, close-knit families often can’t understand why those of us who were abused may have such trouble with relationships or with life itself.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents

“I encourage you to set foot on a journey to a more authentic life, the same journey I wrote about in my memoir, The Box of Daughter: Healing the Authentic Self.  Sharing our stories helps us heal ourselves, and as we share, we begin to heal ourselves, and in doing so, we help to heal the world.”
― Katherine Mayfield, Dysfunctional Families: Healing from the Legacy of Toxic Parents