The Origins of You Quotes

“Your inner self knows something about what’s happening, and your reactivity is letting you know that you don’t like what’s going on, that you feel uncomfortable or threatened, or that you’re in danger.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Reactivity is one of the greatest indicators that you have a wound. When you have a strong reaction to something, that reaction is sounding an alarm.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Whether you avoid connection and intimacy to protect yourself from being abandoned again, or whether you attach quickly and anxiously in your relationships, the end result is still an absence of authentic connection.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“When someone in your family system does something that violates your trust and doesn’t do anything or very little to restore it, then closing off and shutting down might feel like the only option.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“A prioritization wound leaves you questioning your importance and value to the people to whom you so desperately want to matter.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“prioritized child is a child whose needs are seen, understood, and honored. It doesn’t mean that you’re given everything you want or that you’re the focus in every moment. Parents are allowed to have boundaries and say no, and they’re allowed to have a life of their own that they, too, honor and prioritize.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“True belonging has no hint of arrogance or reactivity, and as Brené Brown says, it is not passive. “[True belonging] is a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Living authentically means that your choices and actions align with your core beliefs, values, and true self. It means that you choose that path even when there are consequences from the world around you.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Our wounds and our gifts are next-door neighbors.” What a beautiful reminder that some of our greatest gifts do emerge from the pain we’ve endured.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“And instead of needing to be in control, I learned to trust that someone could lead me without taking advantage of me.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Instead of trying to get others to change, to take a different path, or to see the suffering they were living in, I acknowledged who they were—and I changed the way I related to their not changing.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“A well-known quote attributed to Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, author, and psychiatrist, goes like this: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Instead of being led by fear, insecurity, or unhealed origin wounds, you can put into action the behaviors that support your goals.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“As the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung would say, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“A chronically distracted and preoccupied family has lasting effects. It’s painful to grow up questioning whether you’re a priority, whether you matter more than those other things that are distracting the adults from paying attention to you. And that experience can come forward with you into your adult relationships, in ways that are both obvious and subtle.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“The things that distract parents from children are at best stressors to that child, and at worst threaten children’s beliefs about themselves and their value in this world. Later in life, the children of chronically distracted parents may consciously believe they are seeking out relationships in which they are a priority. In reality, however, these still-wounded adults wind up unconsciously seeking out dynamics that tend to repeat and support what they learned from their families decades earlier: they don’t matter. If you didn’t feel prioritized in your family system, then you might have a prioritization wound.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“In what ways did you learn to survive through rejection? How has rejection served you? And does it still today? In what ways do you currently operate from a place of rejection, and might you get curious about what that’s protecting you from or blocking you from?”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“It’s interesting how whether you’re in adaptation or rejection mode, you’re still left feeling like you’re on the outside, or at the very minimum, that you can’t be authentically you.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“The way our parents speak to us and the words they use tell us a lot about them . . . but when we’re children, their words tell us the most about ourselves.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“When I first started therapy, I didn’t see any of this. I was convinced that the issue I needed to work on was “improving communication and conflict in my relationships.” I found myself inexplicably at odds with people in all aspects of my life—friends, colleagues, and especially people I dated—but somehow I never traced these different frustrations and struggles back to this inciting incident in my childhood. I survived that, I told myself. I kept the peace.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“The two people whom I’d trusted to be my protectors were so busy fighting each other they for a time lost sight of me. I realized I had to create my own safety.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Home is the first place we learn whether we matter or not, whether we are worthy or not, or whether we are deserving or not.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Honoring your voice is not dependent on whether another person hears you or not. To honor your voice requires you to hear yourself—always.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“acknowledge her safety wound, see how it was a constraint to her communication, and recognize that her passivity was not only blocking others from hearing, seeing, and understanding her, it was keeping her from fully witnessing and acknowledging herself. This work was a part of reclaiming her voice, which had been taken from her long ago in a family environment that wasn’t safe for her.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“So many folks with safety wounds become passive communicators. Their past experiences have taught them that it’s not safe to share, speak up, or ask for things. They learn that when they do speak up, they’ll often be met with hostility, defensiveness, attempts at domination, abuse, criticism, or contempt. To avoid is the safety. To share lacks the safety.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“one of the most important aspects of healthy intimate communication is relational self-awareness. She describes this as “the ability and willingness to look honestly at what tends to set you off in your intimate relationship and how you handle yourself when you feel upset.” If you’re like most of us, you’ve probably engaged more in linear thinking, which internally might sound something like: You’re so insensitive, I’m so unreliable, you never do what I ask you to do, this wouldn’t have happened if you just cared more, this only happened because I’m”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Conflict, when done well, can move people toward deeper connection, intimacy, and healing with themselves and each other. I see it as a flag in the sand that lets each of us know that something very important is going on beneath the surface. Conflict is one of the greatest indicators that on the other side of slowing down, curiosity, and openness is something unhealed that’s crying for your attention.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Tending to our wounds disrupts our reactivity, preventing us from lapsing into the same conflict cycles. It doesn’t always happen in the moment when things are hot, but if we have a commitment to growth, there is the opportunity to circle back and see what it is that’s being missed.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“Emotional wounds are similar. They form because you have a painful experience that affects you on an emotional and psychological level. There might not be anything to show for it, like a scab, but it has lasting effects, effects that run deep.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“although the first education you get about love, communication, boundaries, and other things comes from your family of origin, origin stories are not always birthed in your family. They don’t even necessarily originate in your childhood! You will find origin stories and influences from society, media, religion, teachers, coaches, and past romantic relationships. These stories can be written in your teen years, young adult life, or even just a short time ago—whenever you encounter something for the first time. Origin stories are often (but not always) childhood stories. We’re continually writing and rewriting the narrative of our lives.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love