10 Quotes by Peg Streep

As Louis Cozolino Ph. D., observes, a consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be. What Cozolino explains, is that the child creates a "persona" for her parents but doesn't learn to know herself. What happens is that "the authentic self"--the part of us open to feelings, experinces, and intimicy--remains underdeveloped.

We want desperately to believe that every mother falls in love with her baby at first sight and that the complexity of relationships, so evident elsewhere as part of the human condition, is totally absent from the connection between mother and child.

With insecure attachments, “a child unwittingly memorizes the precise lesson of that troubled relationship: that love is suffocation, that anger is terrifying, that dependence is humiliating, or one of a million crippling variations.

What the person high in narcissistic traits doesn’t do constitutes a pattern of its own and, in many ways, makes him easier to identify. Once you’ve focused on what he isn’t doing, you can see that what motivates him isn’t the need to connect to you in any meaningful way – which is, of course, what you’ve been hoping for all along – but a very private and specific agenda which is making sure that his vision of himself stays protected and invulnerable.

But sibling relationships can also be shaped by the dynamic between the unloving mother and her daughter, most particularly when a mother differentiates between her children, being loving and attentive to one but not to another. In many families, the dynamic will weaken sibling bonds.

I know the answer now, and that knowledge absolutely coexists with a terrible longing for the mother love I never had and never will have.

I was younger, smarter, better educated than she, and I began to realize that she was afraid of me and the truths I told. By the.

The parent of a child, as Deborah Tannen has written, has the power not only to create the world the child lives in but the ability to dictate how that world is to be interpreted. Seen from that point of view, one of the lasting and important legacies of a mean mother is a wellspring of self-doubt. The other, explained by adaptive behavior, is a need to replicate the relationship she has to her mother with other people, regardless of how unhappy it makes her.

Children of mothers who are only sometimes available and who aren’t reliably attuned adapt by being ambivalently attached. Because they don’t know what to expect – is she going to be the nice mommy or the yelling one? – these children develop anxiety and insecurity about the maternal relationship and, as adults, a sense of all relationships as being essentially unreliable.