110 Quotes About Dysfunctional-families

The greater the pain associated with love, the more likely a person is to be attracted to others who will inflict this pain…for isn’t this what love is? Hurt people tend to hurt other people.

Teenagers can spot hypocrisy a mile away and here I was telling them how to cope when they witnessed the shambles of my own life and how I was living.

One needn't stop dysfunction; just evince and reflect.

I’m going to make an exception for you. If you want to study me – every inch of me – I’m willing to be your lab rat.” “Well, I’d need to have research questions if it’s going to be a valid scientific endeavor.

If I, as a child, claim that something awful has happened—that someone has done something terrible to me—and everyone around me acts as if nothing is the matter, then either I must be crazy, or all of them are. And when you’re a kid and your life depends on all these people, there is no choice: of course, I must be crazy.

At some point in the life of every scapegoat, the clock will strike the midnight hour, the masks will come off, and the aggression of family will reveal itself.

But what happens to the girl with no positive parental examples? What happens to the girl with the cold mother who conditioned herself to bury her emotions? And what happens to the girl with the father who is an example of who not to marry?

It’s the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.

Children have empty erasable white boards upon which big people write indelibly imprinted messages into their tender subconscious minds.