Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even though he says admirable things, is empty within. If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself. …More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this ‘something’ that is born of silence. If you only practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence…after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence.
—St. Isaac the Syrian
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Working things through with our parents therefore has the potential to affect all our relationships profoundly, even our relationship with ourselves. Because the internalized image of our parents is so formative of our own sense of self, we are mistaken if we think we can rid ourselves of our parents simply by putting the distance of time or space between them and us. Decades, indeed a whole lifetime, can go by without seeing them, but our relationship with them will not cease to live on inside our own minds. Even if we have consciously “forgotten” them, they are nevertheless operative and present to us unconsciously, that is, outside of our awareness. Insofar as we successfully dissociate ourselves from them inwardly, all that we actually accomplish is to split them off from our ego awareness; unfortunately, in doing so we also cut off any possibility for growth, change, or healing to take place in relation to them.
Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care
Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger -
If parents fail to do this [embrace their own unconscious wounds], they unwittingly pass on the weight of unhealed suffering to their children. It is not the psychic wounds of the parents which are, themselves, toxic to the children, but the lack of conscious encounter with those wounds that pervades the family unconscious and gets transferred to the next generation. If the previous generation hasn’t consciously suffered, the pain will be handed on, often unconsciously, to the next generation.
Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care
Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger -
If they are distant or detached from their family of origin, for example, they would likely become overly invested in and emotionally enmeshed with their own children, making it difficult for the children to grow normally. They would likely feel engulfed by the overcloseness of their parent, and would typically react by disconnecting and pulling away, thus perpetuating the cycle for yet another generation. Cutting off parents apparently does not resolve the relational impasse; it merely displaces it.
Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care
Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger -
Learning to forgive our parents has enormous implications for our emotional and spiritual growth, perhaps more than any other relationship we have, for the simple reason that our parents are internalized parts of our own personality in a unique sense. Achieving a more harmonious relationship with our parents in the outer world simultaneously affects our inner world as well, that is, our relationship to ourselves. If we experience forgiving our actual mother and father for the hurt they caused us, the internalized representations of our parents would also change, allowing for less need to split off or repress painful aspects of the self. Our “inner” parents would become far less persecuting and more supportive as a consequence.
Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care
Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger -
All anger is in danger of rationalization, but resentment more than anything perhaps can distort the truthfulness of our memory. As the saying goes, “The older I get, the more vividly I remember things that never happened.”
Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung -
Perhaps we even lash out at others around us because we feel impotent shaking our fists at God. Often the real culprit in cases of wrath at the wrong object is our excessive expectations of what we deserve or the sort of treatment we are due.
Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung -
Rather than securing freedom from anxiety and ample provision to satisfy our desires, wealth actually increases our worry, insecurity, and desire for more. Evagrius of Pontus, one of the desert fathers, concurs: “A monk with many possessions is like a heavily laden boat that easily sinks in a sea storm. Just as a very leaky ship is submerged by each wave, so the person with many possessions is awash with his concerns.”
Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
SO GOOD QUOTES 