Sublime

For generations, sadly, the mother who wanted to engender esteem in herself and her offspring needed the very qualities that were expressly forbidden to her: vehemence, fearlessness, and fearsomeness.

The light of awareness must penetrate the fear, resentment, and shame of the child, in order to uncover the images that have become buried in the unconscious mind. We must be willing to see the truth of our mistreatment as children, including our parents’ flaws, without having to eradicate the good that may also have been present.

we soon learn which of our behaviors lead to our parents’ disappearances and begin to suppress those parts. With no thought involved at all, we can begin to stop ourselves from healthy expressions of joy or sadness or anger in the effort to keep our parents with us.

In a session Martha looked at why she believed her self-critical voices, but not her self-praising ones. She discovered the secret belief that “If it hurts, it must be true.”

If you believe your children are making you scream at them, you have placed them in charge of you.

who, when the mother does a good-enough job meeting his or her basic needs, feels total adoration.

realizing it, our parents and our teachers take our “spirit” away.

Critical education theorist bell hooks, echoing Paulo Freire, calls this a “banking” model of education: we treat human learners as if they are safe-deposit boxes for knowledge and ideas, mere intellectual receptacles for beliefs. We then think of action as a kind of “withdrawal” from this bank of knowledge, as if our action and behavior were alway