The free expression of resentment against one's parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one's true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and - with luck - reconciliation.

It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something that I could not have learned from any book.

Disrespect is the weapon of the weak

The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.

The achievement of freedom is hardly possible without the felt mourning. This ability to mourn, i.e, to give up the illusion of a happy childhood, can restore vitality and creativity if a person is able to experience that he was never loved as a child for what he was, but for his achievements, success and good qualities. And that he sacrificed his childhood for this love, this will shake him very deeply.

One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.

The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.