94 Quotes by Gavin de Becker

A woman is expected, first and foremost, to respond to every communication from a man.

When young, they are attached by heavy chains to large stakes driven deep into the ground. They pull and yank and strain and struggle, but the chain is too strong, the stake too rooted. One day they give up, having learned that they cannot pull free, and from that day forward they can be “chained” with a slender rope. When this enormous animal feels any resistance, though it has the strength to pull the whole circus tent over, it stops trying. Because it believes it cannot, it cannot.

Typecasting always involves a slight insult, and usually one that is easy to refute. But since it is the response itself that the typecaster seeks, the defense is silence, acting as if the words weren’t even spoken.

Rock climbers and long-distance ocean swimmers will tell you it isn’t the mountain or the water that kills – it is panic.

Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki said, “The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities.

I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life.

Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth of intervention.

Like the battered child, the battered woman gets a powerful feeling of overwhelming relief when an incident ends. She becomes addicted to that feeling. The abuser is the only person who can deliver moments of peace, by being his better self for a while. Thus, the abuser holds the key to the abused person’s feeling of well-being.

Usually, they have to attach a tentacle to someone else before detaching all the tentacles from their current object.