Top 90 Pete Walker Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Those who are repetitively traumatized in childhood often learn to survive by over-using one or two of the 4F Reponses. Fixation in any one 4F response not only limits our ability to access all the others, but also severely impairs our ability to relax into an undefended state. Additionally, it strands us in a narrow, impoverished experience of life.”

— Pete Walker

52. “When we become lost in this process, we miss out on our crucial emotional need to experience a sense of belonging. We live in permanent estrangement oscillating between the extremes of too good for others or too unlikeable to be included. This is the excruciating social perfectionism of the Janus-faced critic: others are too flawed to love and we are too defective to be lovable.”

— Pete Walker

53. “Self-esteem cannot be reclaimed while perfectionism prevails. Self-esteem is in many ways the opposite of perfectionism.”

— Pete Walker

54. “Cptsd typically includes an attachment disorder that comes from the absence of a sympathetic caregiver in childhood. When the developing child lacks a supportive parental refuge, she never learns that other people can soothe loneliness and emotional pain. She never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of her experience.”

— Pete Walker

55. “MIRRORING Out of this will come a person who is going to have a good image of herself. Someone who will be able to walk into rooms without undue shyness, believe that other people like her, accept praise for her work as due, and smile at the nice reflection of herself in other people’s eyes just as she smiles back at what she sees in the mirror. – Nancy Friday.”

— Pete Walker

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

— Pete Walker

57. “We need to understand exactly how appalling parenting created the now self-perpetuating trauma that we live in. We can learn to do this in a way that takes the mountain of unfair self-blame off ourselves. We can redirect this blame to our parents’ dreadful child-rearing practices. And we can also do this in a way that motivates us to reject their influence so that we can freely orchestrate our journey of recovering.”

— Pete Walker

58. “I believe this type of emotional hunger is at the core of most food addictions. One of the reasons food addictions are so difficult to manage is that food was the first source of self-comforting that was available to us. With the dearth of any other comfort, there is little wonder that we came to over-rely on eating for nurturance.”

— Pete Walker

59. “Here then are some useful messages for nurturing the growth of your self-compassion and self-esteem. I recommend that you imagine speaking them to your inner child, especially when you are suffering with a flashback. Reparenting Affirmations I am so glad you were born. You are a good person.”

— Pete Walker

60. “Ambivalating is one of the healing processes of psychotherapy. When clients are encouraged to thoroughly explore their conflicting feelings about job or relationship issues, they eventually connect with a deep intuitive sense about what is best for them.”

— Pete Walker

61. “Finally, positive visualization can be a powerful adjunct to thought-substitution. Some survivors gradually learn to short-circuit the fear-mongering processes of the critic by invoking images of past successes and accomplishments, as well as picturing safe places, loving friends or comforting memories.”

— Pete Walker

62. “As unsupported children, we have to dissociate because we are not able to effectively grieve.”

— Pete Walker

63. “However, when we thoroughly vent our angry feelings about the past, feelings of forgiveness become more accessible. When we learn how to grieve ourselves out of abandonment flashbacks, we reemerge into a feeling of belonging to and loving the world.”

— Pete Walker

64. “Thus, grieving is especially profound when we can fluidly shift between feeling and emoting. Sometimes we will only need to fully feel and accept the sensations of our pain. Other times we will want to verbally ventilate about our pain with someone who gives us full permission to color our words with angering and tears.”

— Pete Walker

65. “When contempt replaces the milk of human kindness at an early age, the child feels humiliated and overwhelmed. Too helpless to protest or even understand the unfairness of being abused, the child eventually becomes convinced that she is defective and fatally flawed. Frequently she comes to believe that she deserves her parents’ persecution.”

— Pete Walker

66. “Survivors who want to defend their healthy ambivalence can respond to make-up-your-mind assaults by replying that the matter in question is emotional and clearly not a matter of reason or choice. I remember how my own natural.”

— Pete Walker

67. “Fully feeling people are also rewarded with increasing richness in their relationships – both with themselves and with others. Love manifests as a palpable warmth and excitement when it is grounded in the heart and body by feeling. Emotional love is so much more profound than the lightweight intellectual experiences of thought-bound people for whom love is often only an ideal, a dream, or a hungry expectation.”

— Pete Walker

68. “When we disburden ourselves of old unresolved traumas, energy wasted holding the past at bay becomes available for celebrating daily life.”

— Pete Walker

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

— Pete Walker

70. “A child who grows up with no reliable human source of love, support and protection typically falls into a great deal of social unease. He “naturally” becomes reluctant to seek support from anyone, and he is forced to adopt self-sufficiency as a survival strategy.”

— Pete Walker

71. “A reluctance to participate in such a fundamental realm of the human experience results in much unnecessary loss. For just as without night there is no day, without work there is no play, without hunger there is no satiation, without fear there is no courage, without tears there is no joy, and without anger, there is no real love.”

— Pete Walker

72. “I pray that I may be graced with the cleansing waters of forgiveness. I pray that I may relate to forgiveness in a beneficial and non-grasping way. Let me know who to forgive and be with, who to forgive and avoid, and who I do not need to forgive. Let me learn to forgive others by becoming more forgiving of myself.”

— Pete Walker

73. “Do I really agree with this thought, or have I been pressured into believing it? How do I want to respond to this feeling – distract myself from it, repress it, express it or just feel it until it changes into something else?”

— Pete Walker

74. “Emoting is when we cry, anger out, or verbally ventilate the energy of an inner emotional experience. Feeling, on the other hand, is the inactive process of staying present to internal emotional experience without reacting. In recovery then, feeling is surrendering to our internal experiences of pain without judging or resisting them, and without emoting them out.”

— Pete Walker

75. “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

76. “As much as I can forgive myself, that much can I forgive others. What I often forgive in others is an old pain of mine, released from the disgust of self-hate. It is an old vulnerability of mine that I now love and welcome like a bird with a broken wing. Shame and self-hate did not start with me, but with all my heart, I deign that they will stop with me. I will do unto myself as I would have others do unto me.”

— Pete Walker

77. “They do this by shaming or intimidating you whenever you have a natural impulse to have sympathy for yourself, or stand up for yourself. The instinct to care for yourself and to protect yourself against unfairness is then forced to become dormant.”

— Pete Walker

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

— Pete Walker

79. “Self-criticism, then, runs non-stop in a desperate attempt to avoid rejection-inducing mistakes. Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid punishment and worsening abandonment. At the same time, it continuously fills her psyche with stories and images of catastrophe. The survivor becomes imprisoned by a jailer who will accept nothing but perfection. He is chauffeured by a hysterical driver who sees nothing but danger in every turn of the road.”

— Pete Walker

80. “For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers. I have known several survivors, who have never gotten so much as a parking ticket, who cringe in anxiety whenever they come across a policeman or a police car.”

— Pete Walker

81. “How many tasks had I dared not attempt because I accepted their reverberating jibes that I was “good for nothing?”

— Pete Walker

82. “It appears that children are hard-wired to release fear through angering and crying. The newborn baby, mourning the death of living safely and fully contained inside the mother, utters the first of many angry cries not only to call for nurturance and attention, but also to release her fear.”

— Pete Walker

83. “She never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of her experience.”

— Pete Walker

84. “She could see that the outer critic typically triggered her into a very old feeling and belief that “People are so unreliable – they always let you down –they just can’t be trusted!”

— Pete Walker

85. “Food offers us our first outside source of self-soothing, and when a child is starving for love, he frequently makes food his love object.”

— Pete Walker

86. “Moreover, most of the diagnoses mentioned above are typically treated as innate characterological defects rather than as learned maladaptations to stress – adaptations that survivors were forced to learn as traumatized children. And, most importantly, because these adaptations were learned, they can often be extinguished.”

— Pete Walker

87. “The most essential of these are the deaths of our self-compassion and our self-esteem, as well as our abilities to protect ourselves and fully express ourselves.”

— Pete Walker

88. “Writing touches the unconscious in a way that talking does not. It gets beyond the old, to the truth of the real stories within.”

— Pete Walker

89. “Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid punishment and worsening abandonment. At the same time, it continuously fills her psyche with stories and images of catastrophe.”

— Pete Walker

90. “It taught me to practice self-care in a spirit of giving to a child who needed and really deserved to be helped.”

— Pete Walker

91. “Mutual commiseration also typically promotes a spontaneous opening into many levels of light-hearted and spontaneous connecting.”

— Pete Walker