Quotessence
Home / Authors / Victoria Secunda Biography

Victoria Secunda Biography

Author

Related Quotes

“If father and daughter can manage to cross the finish line of her emancipation together- she accepting Daddy's flaws, he viewing hers as opportunities for her to learn and grow- the ups and downs of their relationship and mutual growth can prepare her for the ambiguities of life. The example of the father weathering his own emotional seasons can help the daughter weather her own.”

Growing UpParentingFathers And DaughtersFather Daughter RelationshipParent Child Relationships
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“Idealizing Daddy is grand when you're five; it's crippling when you're twenty-five or thirty-five. For if you still believe in Daddy's miracles, you may not believe that you can make your own dreams come true. Worse, you may not even be able to formulate them without his guidance,”

Growing UpFathersFather Daughter RelationshipIdealizationWomen And Their Fathers
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“Little children require their parent's unqualified love in order to survive and feel secure. Very soon, however, they need a tempered version of that devotion- parents who can give them the freedom to fail or feel sorrow or taste frustration, to fully experience their own pain and pleasure and learn from them. Therapists call this phenomenon "ownership.”

Growing UpParents And ChildrenParenting AdviceChildhood Parenting
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“If it is your fault that your mother is miserable, it becomes a potentially fixable affront. Taking blame means that at least the hope of love is still there-all you have to do is deserve it.”

ChildhoodParentsChild AbuseMothers And DaughtersChildhood TraumaNarcissistic AbuseScapegoatInferiority ComplexMother Daughter RelationshipAttachment Trauma
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“Many daughters live out their lives avoiding or abiding or arguing with their mothers-burying the long-ago injury or insult or childhood deprivation under a blanket of forgetfulness-and not confronting it head-on. It's humiliating to remember the ways in which one demeaned oneself in order to prevent being in a mother's bad graces, the willingness to do anything in order to not be rejected, when rejection felt like death.”

ChildhoodParentsRejectionChild AbuseMothers And DaughtersChildhood TraumaScapegoatInferiority ComplexMother Daughter RelationshipAttachment Trauma
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.”

ChildhoodParentsChild AbuseMothers And DaughtersChildhood TraumaScapegoatInferiority ComplexMother Daughter RelationshipEmotional NeglectAttachment Trauma
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“If your mother lived your life as though it were her own-never allowing you a moment of stress or frustration, routinely sleeping in your bed when you had a bad dream, never setting limits or establishing boundaries, seldom or never letting you out of her sight, excusing and failing to provide consequences for your negative or hurtful behaviour, insisting on a daily chronicle of every detail of your life, all in the name of maternal love-then you never had to grow up and take responsibility for your actions. You remain a child.”

ChildhoodParentsChild AbuseMothers And DaughtersChildhood TraumaScapegoatInferiority ComplexMother Daughter RelationshipAttachment TraumaEngulfing Mother
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“One only has to watch aging siblings scrap over the worthless pots and pans and scuffed furniture of a deceased parent's estate- like toddlers over toys- to see how desperate is the need to wrest some last, pathetic, tangible measure of their parent's devotion.”

ParentingParentsParents And ChildrenSiblingsSibling Rivalry
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“Happiness" alone does not guarantee mental health and well-being. A tempering dose of disappointment- an occasional taste of frustration and learning that you do recover from it- goes a long way toward producing long-term contentment. Indeed the ability to ride out the bad times without feeling doomed is essential to survival. When happiness is not taken for granted, and when one is acquainted with its opposite it is more easily savored and has more lasting effects.”

HappinessDepressionEmotionsMental HealthMoodWell BeingContentmentHappiness AdviceEmotional RegulationDialectical Behavioral Therapy
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“People who are used to constant attention and flattery become inured to the merely pleasant and become "peak seekers." They expect the highs, and when their unrealistic goals or expectations are not met, they are not simply disappointed, they are devastated.”

HappinessEmotionsEmotional RegulationVictoria Secunda
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“If you scratch below the glossy surface of many "enviable" marriages, often you'll find a disenchanted wife whose husband finds the landscape of her emotions as uninteresting as the moon's.”

MarriageEmotionsMen And WomenEnvyMarriage QuotesPerfect MarriageMen And Women Relationship
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“It helps enormously to have had a loving mother. Mothers can give their daughters permission to love their fathers. Mothers can help their daughters feel good about becoming mothers. Mothers can help daughters learn the value of openness and female friendship, especially when times are bad,”

ParentingMothersParents And ChildrenMothers And DaughtersFemale Friendship
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“Mothers are not simply models of femininity to their daughters but also examples of how a woman reacts to a man. Daughters learn about fathers, and men, not only by being with Dad but also by observing their parent's marital relationship-- or its unraveling. When mothers and fathers are supportive or each other, it makes each of their paternal jobs infinitely easier. And parents who cannot bear being in one another's presence reveal as much, if not more, to a child about romantic love as anything the mother or father might say.”

MothersChild RearingFathers And DaughtersMarital Issues
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“A girl's sense of her womanly self depends only in part on how closely she has followed her mother's example in attire and actions, or how much she loves or hates or respects her. It is from both parents that a girl gains her basic identity.”

ParentingMothersSense Of SelfMothers And DaughtersFathers And Daughters
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“For all children, mothers are their first love, their first acquaintance with intimacy, touch, warmth, tenderness, sustenance. Infancy is a conspiracy between mothers and their babies, a bond that fathers can only helplessly witness, denied the profound pleasure and pain of giving birth.”

PregnancyMothersFathersFathers And Daughters
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“If unloving mothers were able to see their behavious as abusive, they either would stop behaving that way or they would get help for their dysfunction. But many cannot: instead, they deny it, to themselves, their families, and the world at large, in order to avoid a sense of guilt, to avoid having to make changes in their lives, or to avoid the bruising awareness that they, too, were unloved children.”

ChildhoodAbuseEmotional AbuseChildhood TraumaMother Daughter RelationshipEngulfing MotherNarcissistic Parent
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“If you are told from the time you are one month that you're no good and you're not smart and you can't do it and you don't have an opinion of your own and you pick the wrong friends and you don't study the right way and you don't wear the right clothes and you don't look nice, at some point you're going to start believing it. And if you believe it, you're going to need a mommy to tell you what to do. And that's abuse. Not to let your child grow up to be an independent, respected human being.”

ChildhoodAbuseEmotional AbuseChildhood TraumaMother Daughter RelationshipEngulfing MotherNarcissistic Parent
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“Another step is that daughters can learn to monitor their own feelings and instincts by saying, "I feel uncomfortable (angry, dominated, usurped, inadequate, guilty, furious) with my mother more often than I do not. I have to pay attention to that, because it shows in how I treat my friends (lover, spouse, kids, colleagues). There is validity here. I don't have to blame or excuse my mother-I just have to see her so I can see myself.”

ChildhoodAbuseEmotional AbuseChildhood TraumaMother Daughter RelationshipEngulfing MotherNarcissistic Parent
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“When a mother attempts to bind a grown daughter to her, whether by fear or neediness or illness or rage, the consequences can be devastating. To continue trying to please an unpleasable mother threatens an adult daughter's mental health and all of her relationships. And yet such daughters keep coming back to their mothers, without the daughters' altering that relationship and their bitter or anguished reactions to it.”

ChildhoodAbuseEmotional AbuseChildhood TraumaMother Daughter RelationshipEngulfing MotherNarcissistic Parent
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“But many more daughters of distant fathers are unable to reach orgasm, or achieve it with consistency with any man. Indeed these daughters have the most trouble in bed: for them, affection and arousal are synonymous with rejection.”

SexFathersFathers And DaughtersArousalOrgasmsFather Daughter RelationshipWomen And Their FathersVictoria SecundaDistant Fathers
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“We forget in order to survive our childhoods, when we are totally dependent on our parents' goodwill; but to recover from such childhoods, we must begin by remembering-the bad and the good.”

NeglectChild AbuseChildhood TraumaNarcissistic MothersAbusive MothersEngulfing MotherEnmeshmentIgnoring Mother
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“If a mother has an unhealthy need to dominate her children-which she demonstrates by bullying, terrifying, neglecting, suffocating, indulging, humiliating, overprotecting or abusing them- those children must come to the recognition that such treatment is wrong in order to begin the long process of recovery and ultimate understanding.”

NeglectChild AbuseChildhood TraumaNarcissistic MothersAbusive MothersEngulfing MotherEnmeshmentIgnoring Mother
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“When we recognize that we are not responsible for our childhood deprivations, and that we are entitled to feel anger (but not to act on it - awareness is not a license to kill), then we are able to let go of that anger and not be controlled by it.”

NeglectChild AbuseChildhood TraumaNarcissistic MothersAbusive MothersEngulfing MotherEnmeshmentIgnoring Mother
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“I have always tried to be all the tings my mother wanted me to be; ever the lady, always polite, never inconsiderate. I run my business the way my mother ran our house - everything just so. In some ways I am my mother - full of life when I'm happy, very cold when I'm angry. People say I look just like her. I'll tell you a secret: every time I pass a mirror, I gasp. I wonder if there's more here than meets the eye." - Karen, thirty-nine.”

NeglectChild AbuseChildhood TraumaNarcissistic MothersAbusive MothersEngulfing MotherEnmeshmentIgnoring MotherGenerational Anger
Book:When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life
Create image

“Children who are accustomed to being treated well internalize that treatment and have a permanent sense of well-being. But children whose every need is instantly gratified and who are constantly praised to the skies do not have the same sense of well-being; rather they may feel despair or rage when that gratification is withheld, or when everyone doesn't glorify them in the same way.”

ParentingParents And ChildrenGratificationEmotional RegulationChildrearingVictoria SecundaChildren S Well BeingChild DevelopmentelopmentPraising Children
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“When fathers are lovingly involved with their daughters from birth, the daughters reap the benefits all their lives. Daughters who had fathers they could count on are the most likely to be drawn to men who treat them well, to see their lovers as dependable people who won't suddenly disappear, and to be consistently orgasmic.”

ParentingSexualityFathersFathers And DaughtersFemale OrgasmWomen And Their Fathers
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“A well-fathered daughter will seek in her partnerships men who mirror the devoted father of childhood, avoiding partnerships that denigrate or compromise her. Having experienced the real thing when she was very young- having been taught self-reliance, she settles for no less when she is an adult.”

RelationshipsParentingFathers And DaughtersWomen And Their FathersHeathly Relationships
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“A certain emotional frostiness is the heritage of a culture that puts great stock in WASP values: One does not talk about money sex, religion, and above all, one does not expose one's feelings. If a case can be made for the cultural contouring of personality, the Puritan ethic is the culprit in such rubrics as 'Children should be seen and not heard' and 'Never complain, never explain.”

CulturePuritanismRubricsWaspWaspishness
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“Lacking older siblings, the oldest or only child identifies primarily with her parents, conforming to their ideals and demands, not the least reason being that she no one with whom to share those demands. Since firstborns try to live up to the expectations of adults- teachers' as well as parents'- rather than that of peers, they are likely to learn more and to bring home better report cards than younger siblings. Thus firstborns pave the way for younger siblings, setting the standards against which they are measured and measure themselves. Middle children tend to be more gregarious and more dependent on the approval of peers than that of adults. For one thing they have the example of the older sibling- who has the credibility of generational sameness- to guide them in their decisions and to teach them the rules of the family road. An older sister who was grounded for a month for coming home late from a date, for instance, is a lesson not lost on her younger sister or brother. At the same time younger children are buffered by birth order from their parents' sole concentration. Hence they are treated with more indulgence and are called upon less to take on responsibilities.”

ParentingFamily DynamicsMiddle ChildFirst BornBirth OrderYoungest Sibling
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image

“The good father does not have to be perfect. Rather, he has to be good enough to help his daughter to become a woman who is reasonably self-confident, self-sufficient, and free of crippling self-doubt, and to feel at ease in the company of men.”

ParentingFathersFathers And DaughtersFather Daughter RelationshipFather Daughter Bond
Book:Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
Create image