Top 90 Pete Walker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When inward tenderness Finds the secret hurt, Pain itself will crack the rock And, Ah! Let the soul emerge. – Rumi.”

— Pete Walker

2. “Man cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. – Alexis Canell.”

— Pete Walker

3. “Emotional Neglect: The Core Wound In Complex PTSD Minimization about the damage caused by extensive emotional neglect is at the core of the Cptsd denial onion. Our journey of recovering takes a quantum leap when we really feel and understand how devastating it was to be emotionally abandoned.”

— Pete Walker

4. “I see there is no prison except that which I construct to protect myself from feeling my pain. – Sheldon Kopp.”

— Pete Walker

5. “The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain.”

— Pete Walker

6. “Perfectionism. My perfectionism arose as an attempt to gain safety and support in my dangerous family. Perfection is a self-persecutory myth. I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved in the present. I am letting go of relationships that require perfection. I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes.”

— Pete Walker

7. “We do not have to let other people’s irresponsible emotional expression alienate us from our feelings.”

— Pete Walker

8. “12. Time Urgency. I am not in danger. I do not need to rush. I will not hurry unless it is a true emergency. I am learning to enjoy doing my daily activities at a relaxed pace.”

— Pete Walker

9. “Neuroplasticity means that the brain can grow and change throughout our life. Old self-destructive neural pathways can be diminished and new healthier ones can replace them.”

— Pete Walker

10. “Natural anger eventually arises when we really get how little and defenseless we were when our parents bullied us into hating ourselves.”

— Pete Walker

11. “I also like to apply “good enough” to other concepts such as a good enough job, a good enough try, a good enough outing, a good enough day or a good enough life. I apply this concept liberally to contradict the black-and-white, all-or none thinking of the critic which reflexively judges people and things as defective unless they are perfect.”

— Pete Walker

12. “Children who receive good enough parenting easily recognize and protect themselves from bullying and exploitive people because they do not have to become accustomed to being treated unfairly.”

— Pete Walker

13. “Sibling rivalry is further reinforced in dysfunctional families by the fact that all the children are subsisting on minimal nurturance, and are therefore without resources to give to each other. Moreover, competition for the little their parents have to give creates even fiercer rivalries.”

— Pete Walker

14. “Skilled therapists and caregivers learn to discriminate between active and passive suicidal ideation, and do not panic and catastrophize when encountering the latter. Instead, the counselor invites the survivor to explore his suicidal thoughts and feelings knowing that in most cases, verbal ventilation of the flashback pain underneath it will deconstruct the suicidality.”

— Pete Walker

15. “Verbal abuse is the use of language to shame, scare or hurt another. Dysfunctional parents routinely use name-calling, sarcasm, and destructive criticism to overpower and control their children. Verbal abuse is as commonplace in the American family as homework and table manners. It is modeled as socially acceptable in almost every sitcom on television.”

— Pete Walker

16. “Right-brain dissociation can be seen as classical dissociation and as the defense most common to freeze types. It is the right-brain process of numbing out against intense feeling or incessant inner critic attack. Dissociation is once again a process of distraction. Survivors commonly experience it as getting lost in fantasy, fogginess, TV, tiredness or sleep.”

— Pete Walker

17. “The Drama of the Gifted Child. Sean’s inborn gift coming into this life was his compassion and his sense that if he studied his mother enough and figured out what she needed, he could provide for her needs.”

— Pete Walker

18. “If however, a person is also afflicted by ongoing family abuse or profound emotional abandonment, the trauma will manifest as a particularly severe emotional flashback because he already has Cptsd. This is particularly true when his parent is also a bully.”

— Pete Walker

19. “Dysfunctional emotional matching is seen in behaviors such as acting amused at destructive sarcasm, acting loving when someone is punishing, and acting forgiving when someone is repetitively hurtful. I.”

— Pete Walker

20. “Self-mothering is a resolute refusal to indulge in self-hatred and self-abandonment. It proceeds from the realization that self-punishment is counterproductive. It is enhanced by the understanding that patience and self-encouragement are more effective than self-judgment and self-rejection in achieving recovery.”

— Pete Walker

21. “When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal.”

— Pete Walker

22. “A great loss brings up an emotional storm that opens up a hidden reservoir of childhood pain.”

— Pete Walker

23. “Perhaps there was no more detrimental consequence of our childhood abandonment than being forced to habitually hide our authentic selves. Many of us come out of childhood believing that what we have to say is as uninteresting to others as it was to our parents.”

— Pete Walker

24. “To the degree that our caretakers attack or abandon us for showing vulnerability, to that degree do we later avoid the authentic self-expression that is fundamental to intimacy. The outer critic forms to remind us that everyone else is surely as dangerous as our original caretakers. Subliminal memories of being scorned for seeking our parents’ support then short-circuit our inclinations to share our troubles and ask for help.”

— Pete Walker

25. “An especially tragic developmental arrest that afflicts many survivors is the loss of their will power and self-motivation. Many dysfunctional parents react destructively to their child’s budding sense of initiative. If this occurs throughout his childhood, the survivor may feel lost and purposeless in his life. He may drift through his whole life rudderless and without a motor.”

— Pete Walker

26. “Mindfulness is a perspective of benign curiosity about all of your inner experience. Recovery is enhanced immeasurably by developing this helpful process of introspection. As it becomes more developed, mindfulness can be used to recognize and dis-identify from beliefs and viewpoints that you acquired from your traumatizing family.”

— Pete Walker

27. “One common sign of being flashed-back is that we feel small, helpless, and hopeless. In intense flashbacks this magnifies into feeling so ashamed that we are loath to go out or show our face anywhere. Feeling fragile, on edge, delicate and easily crushable is another aspect of this. The survivor may also notice an evaporation of whatever self-esteem he has earned since he left home. This is a flashback to the childhood years where implicit family rules forbade any self-esteem at all.”

— Pete Walker

28. “Feelings and emotions are energetic states that do not magically dissipate when they are ignored. Much of our unnecessary emotional pain is the distressing pressure that comes from not releasing emotional energy. When we do not attend to our feelings, they accumulate inside us and create a mounting anxiety that we commonly dismiss as stress.”

— Pete Walker

29. “Many children appear to be hard-wired to adapt to this endangering abandonment with perfectionism. A prevailing climate of danger forces the child’s superego to over-cultivate the various programs of perfectionism and endangerment listed below. Once again, the superego is the part of the psyche that learns parental rules in order to gain their acceptance.”

— Pete Walker

30. “Feelings of abandonment commonly masquerade as the physiological sensations of hunger. Hunger pain soon after a big meal is rarely truly about food. Typically it is camouflaged emotional hunger and the longing for safe, nurturing connection. Food cannot satiate the hunger pain of abandonment. Only loving support can. Geneen Roth’s book offers powerful self-help book on this subject.”

— Pete Walker

31. “Unfortunately, premature forgiveness strands us in relationships with our parents that are as devoid of genuine warmth and intimacy as ever. Unless we work through the unresolved fear and hurt our parents caused us, we will always be uneasy around them and hold them at an emotional distance. This is commonly the case even when they have outgrown their abusive ways.”

— Pete Walker

32. “Well-adjusted has come to mean unaffected. – Theodore Rubin.”

— Pete Walker

33. “I was appalled at how much pressure my clients were getting to just forgive and forget. Consequently, many of them were diving right back into denial, and minimizing all the trauma that they had endured. Their recovery processes then, screeched to a halt as their inner critics denigrated them for being so unforgiving.”

— Pete Walker

34. “Perfectionism also prevents us from letting in the love of others, no matter how abundant and genuine it is. When we are preoccupied with our deficiencies, we are often untouched by the nurturance others offer us. How tragic that so many of us are convinced we only deserve to be loved when we are happy or excelling.”

— Pete Walker

35. “Extensive childhood abuse installs a powerful people-are-dangerous program.”

— Pete Walker

36. “This is especially good news because what is learned can be unlearned and vice versa.”

— Pete Walker

37. “Toxic shame can also be created by constant parental neglect and rejection.”

— Pete Walker

38. “Create vivid pictures of attainable futures that are safer, friendlier, and more prosperous. Cite.”

— Pete Walker

39. “The price of admission to a relationship with an extreme narcissist is self-annihilation. One of my clients quipped: “Narcissists don’t have relationships; they take prisoners.”

— Pete Walker

40. “Through such neglect the child’s consciousness eventually becomes overwhelmed with the processes of drasticizing and catastrophizing. Drasticizing and catastrophizing are critic processes that lead the child to constantly rehearse fearful scenarios in a vain attempt to prepare himself for the worst. This is the process by which Cptsd with its overdeveloped stress and toxic shame programs sets in and becomes triggerable by a plethora of normally innocuous stimuli.”

— Pete Walker

41. “The most expeditious way to get past an unpleasant emotional experience is to embrace it and to fully feel and express it.”

— Pete Walker

42. “When our emotional intelligence is restricted, we often do not know what we really want, and can consequently struggle mightily with even the smallest decisions.”

— Pete Walker

43. “The worst thing that can happen to a child is to be unwelcomed in his family of origin – to never feel included. Moreover, many survivors have little or no experience of any social arena that feels safe and welcoming.”

— Pete Walker

44. “Here we will also see how verbal and emotional abuse alone can cause Cptsd, and how profound emotional abandonment is typically at the core of most Cptsd.”

— Pete Walker

45. “Grieving is the key process for reconnecting with our repressed emotional intelligence. Grieving reconnects us with our full complement of feelings. Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods. These losses are like deaths of parts of our selves, and grieving can often initiate their rebirth.”

— Pete Walker

46. “Bibliotherapy is a term that describes the very real process of being positively and therapeutically influenced by what you read. As stated earlier, when it is at its most powerful, bibliotherapy is also relationally healing. It can rescue you from the common Cptsd feeling of abject isolation and alienation.”

— Pete Walker

47. “I sometimes feel the most for my clients who were “only” neglected, because it is so difficult to see neglect as hard core evidence. Most people remember little before they were four years old. And by that time, much of this kind of damage is done. It typically takes some very deep introspective work, to realize that current time flashback pain is a re-creation of how bad it felt to be emotionally abandoned.”

— Pete Walker

48. “Pain is excess energy crying out for release.” – Gerald Heard.”

— Pete Walker

49. “Stress is also the painful internal pressure of accumulated emotional energy. Grieving, explored at length herein, is the most effective stress-release mechanism that human beings have. Grieving is a safe, healthy release valve for our internal pressure cookers of emotion.”

— Pete Walker

50. “Many abandoned children enter adulthood feeling that the world is a dangerous place where they are ill-equipped to defend themselves.”

— Pete Walker