You have the right to set ground rules. This means deciding if, when, and how you want to see the people in your family. Many survivors feel that if they open up the channels at all, they have to open them up all the way. When you were a child you had two options–to trust or not to trust. Your options are broader now. Ellen Bass
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. - William Shakespeare

  2. I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt. - Maya Angelou

  3. Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time. - Maya Angelou

  4. The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then... - Thomas Merton

  5. Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel. - Doris Lessing

More Quotes By Ellen Bass
  1. To love life, to love it evenwhen you have no stomach for itand everything you've held dearcrumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heatthickening the air, heavy as watermore fit...

  2. In spite of the horror, in spite of the tragedy, in spite of the weeks of sleepless nights, I'm finally alive. I'm not pretending. I feel real. I'm not playing charades anymore. I wouldn't go back to the way I was for anything. I'm really...

  3. So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault...

  4. This choreography of ruin, the world breakinglike glass under a microscope, the way it doesn’t crack all at once, but spreads out from the damaged cavities. Still for a moment it all recedes. The backyard potatoes swell quietlyburied beneath their canopy of leaves. The wind...

  5. Healing isn’t just about pain. It’s about learning to love yourself. As you move from feeling like a victim to being a proud survivor, you will have glimmers of hope, pride and satisfaction. Those are natural by-products of healing.

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