67 Quotes by Victoria Secunda

A certain emotional frostiness is the heritage of a culture that puts great stock in WASP values: One does not talk about money sex, religion, and above all, one does not expose one's feelings. If a case can be made for the cultural contouring of personality, the Puritan ethic is the culprit in such rubrics as 'Children should be seen and not heard' and 'Never complain, never explain.

Most people can recall schoolyard confrontations with with bullies. Boys were expected to deal with them by standing their ground and slugging it out, even, as one man told me, "if you knew you were going to get your head bashed in. You had to show you could take it, and you'd die rather than cry."But for girls, the surest and safest way to avoid being picked on or terrorized is to get the bully to like you.

Father absence has been implicated in anorexia nervosa, in which daughters may exhibit literal father hunger by starving themselves.

If a mother has an unhealthy need to dominate her children-which she demonstrates by bullying, terrifying, neglecting, suffocating, indulging, humiliating, overprotecting or abusing them- those children must come to the recognition that such treatment is wrong in order to begin the long process of recovery and ultimate understanding.

When we recognize that we are not responsible for our childhood deprivations, and that we are entitled to feel anger (but not to act on it - awareness is not a license to kill), then we are able to let go of that anger and not be controlled by it.

We forget in order to survive our childhoods, when we are totally dependent on our parents' goodwill; but to recover from such childhoods, we must begin by remembering-the bad and the good.

I have always tried to be all the tings my mother wanted me to be; ever the lady, always polite, never inconsiderate. I run my business the way my mother ran our house - everything just so. In some ways I am my mother - full of life when I'm happy, very cold when I'm angry. People say I look just like her. I'll tell you a secret: every time I pass a mirror, I gasp. I wonder if there's more here than meets the eye." - Karen, thirty-nine.

Integral to being emotionally healthy is to have a mother who has the ability to respect her child's differences and not perceive them as betrayals.

A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.