Nurturance Quotes

After self-nurturance, listening to the whispers of our hearts is probably the hardest task we've ever attempted. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Attachment begins early but grows slowly. There are no shortcuts. Verbal guarantees of safety or nurturance carry no more weight than those for hair-replacement systems and miracle slicers. A therapist must prove trustworthy over time. Only consistent experiential demonstrations, in times of both quietude and turbulence, convince the child. Though all children love to be wined and dined, the safety, understanding, warmth, and containment of therapy are what foster trust and ultimately seduce the child patient. (41) ~ Richard Bromfield

The relationship between nurturance and moral self-interest can be seen most clearly in nurturant forms of business practice. It involves the humane treatment of employees, the creation of a safe and humane workplace, social and ecological responsibility, fairness in hiring and promotion, the building of a work community, the development of excellent communication between employees and management and between the company and its customers, opportunities for employee self-development, a positive role in the larger community, scrupulous honesty, a regard for one's customers and for the public, and excellent customer service. Policies such as these have increased the productivity and success of many businesses. They are models of how Nurturant Parent morality can function to help businesses be successful and to allow owners, investors, and employees to seek their self-interest within this moral system. Moral ~ George Lakoff

Most kids who don't feel enough love and nurturance carry around this kind of inner rage- a rage that often lasts throughout adulthood. The people who should have cared for them didn't. The lesson to take away: All people are shit. This is why troubled youth walk around with chips on their shoulders and why they are so hard to help.
Early on they learn that people can't be trusted. They often spend the rest of their lives embracing this damaging belief. Seeing the world through shit-coloured glasses, they are hypersensitive to every possible slight or judgement, and they believe anyone friendly or kind must have an ulterior motive.
Despite all this, wounded people desperately want and need love. But, terrified to trust, they constantly do thing to test and sabotage their relationships. This push-pull dance is well-known to anyone who's ever been close to a victim of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Those who suffer from BPD are hypersensitive to perceived slights from others and can grow notoriously hostile when they feel dissed....
For survivors of abuse, who you trust is a matter of survival. Its black and white. There can be no apologies. There can be no gray. There are no exceptions.-Scared Selfless ~ Michelle Stevens

Self-nurturance, or learning to bask in bliss, is an acquired art form. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

There is nothing inherently metaphoric about such claims of basic experiential morality as "Health is good," "It is better to be cared for than uncared for," "Everyone ought to be protected from physical harm," and "It is good to be loved."
However, as soon as we develop such claims into a full-fledged human morality, we find that virtually all of our abstract moral concepts-justice, rights, empathy, nurturance, strength, uprightness, and so forth-are defined by metaphors. That is why there is no ethical system that is not metaphorical. We understand our experience via these conceptual metaphors, we reason according to their metaphorical logic, and we make judgments on the basis of the metaphors. This is what we mean when we say that morality is metaphoric. ~ George Lakoff

In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well. ~ Richard Rohr

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation ... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging. ~ Bell Hooks

It is these conditions that form the grounding for our system of moral metaphors. Since it is better to be rich than to be poor, morality is conceptualized in terms of wealth. Since it is better to be strong than to be weak, we expect to see morality conceptualized as strength. Because it is better to be healthy than sick, it is no surprise to see morality conceptualized in terms of health and attendant concepts like cleanliness and purity. Since it is better to be cared for than uncared for, it seems natural to find morality conceptualized as nurturance. And because, in normal cases, children tend to be better off if they obey rather than disobey their parents, we expect to see morality conceptualized as obedience. What ~ George Lakoff

It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance. ~ Germaine Greer

While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength. ~ Carol Gilligan

Borderline parents with an insecure sense of self may use jewelry, clothes, and other trappings as proof of their attainment of the idealized happy family, regardless of their means. Rather than unconditional love, nurturance, and open communication, the emphasis may have been on how things appeared to outsiders. Thus the need for expensive cars, respectable jobs, obedient children, well-groomed pets, a carefully landscaped yard.
The ~ Kimberlee Roth

Nurturance implies empathy, self-nurturance, the nurturance of social ties, the cultivation of happiness, and self-development. When one understands Morality As Nurturance metaphorically, a host of other metaphors are entailed: Morality As Empathy, Moral Self-Nurturance, Morality As the Nurturance of Social Ties, Morality As Happiness, and Morality As Self-Development. The Nurturant Parent model of the family gives this whole category of moral schemes its highest priority. M ~ George Lakoff

Humans never outgrow their need to connect with others, nor should they, but mature, truly individual people are not controlled by these needs. Becoming such a separate being takes the whole of a childhood, which in our times stretches to at least the end of the teenage years and perhaps beyond. We need to release a child from preoccupation with attachment so he can pursue the natural agenda of independent maturation. The secret to doing so is to make sure that the child does not need to work to get his needs met for contact and closeness, to find his bearings, to orient.

Children need to have their attachment needs satiated; only then can a shift of energy occur toward individuation, the process of becoming a truly individual person. Only then is the child freed to venture forward, to grow emotionally. Attachment hunger is very much like physical hunger. The need for food never goes away, just as the child's need for attachment never ends. As parents we free the child from the pursuit of physical nurturance. We assume responsibility for feeding the child as well as providing a sense of security about the provision. No matter how much food a child has at the moment, if there is no sense of confidence in the supply, getting food will continue to be the top priority.

A child is not free to proceed with his learning and his life until the food issues are taken care of, and we parents do that as a matter of course. Our duty ought to be equally transparent ~ Gabor Mate

Those who recognize our essential qualities are the true peacebuilders: they let us know that they see the significance of our lives. Meanness of spirit stems from a place of neglect and the absence of nurturance and love. When we have not been seen and loved for who we are, we can turn sour and even violent. ~ James O'Dea

It is important to realize that the Social Nurturance metaphor and the Moral Nurturance metaphor may sometimes contradict each other, even though they form a natural pairing. This occurs when you have to maintain social ties with people in your community who do not believe in or operate by the Moral Nurturance metaphor. Compromising with such people for the sake of maintaining social ties may require compromising on moral nurturance. M ~ George Lakoff

Any little bit of experimenting in self-nurturance is very frightening for most of us. ~ Julia Cameron

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care. ~ Bell Hooks

This leads to a pattern in which the child cries out and either gets nothing or gets an insufficient or intermittent response. Then the child becomes exhausted and collapses, either from depleted energy or giving up to conserve a sliver of energy (Lowen, 1971). It is often at this point--collapse--that the caregiver eventually takes care of the child. This "teaches" the child that he or she has no effect on the world and that nurturance comes when they are collapsed. ~ Elliot Greene

Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

The ways we communicate convey meaning. To the extent that a boss sees a woman subordinate's actions as indicative of nurturance and kindness but not of assertiveness and leadership capability, he is likely to treat her ideas as not deserving of attention and fail to seriously consider her for promotion as well. If his misinterpretation of her communication style is not brought to his attention, she is denied access to senior levels. ~ Kathleen Kelley Reardon

The highest priority for any government concerned with its own future and the peace of the world community ought to be the facilities it provides for the care and nurturance of young children. ~ Eda LeShan

As the biocentric view suggests, the garden prospers when control is balanced by equal measures of humility and benevolence. A balance is struck. Control, servitude, respect, imagination, pragmatism, an ecological conscience, compliance, and a certain measure of mysticism and altruism, all meld together to provide nurturance. ~ Jim Nollman

Marriage is going to be that happy state in which we get all of the nurturance and care and love and empathy and even good advice that we didn't receive from our families. ~ Augustus Y. Napier

I once heard a woman who'd lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy. ~ Caroline Knapp

I suggest Substituting Inedible Nurturance, or SIN. Don't replace overeating with virtuous work or exercise; instead, make a list of things you love, from watching TV to hanging out with favorite people. ~ Martha Beck

It is not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many woman laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson

It's a perfect moment to quietly meditate on the cosmic Great Mother who can inspire us all; the divine, feminine Spirit of nurturance known as The Goddess, so revered in ancient times and being rediscovered by women today. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

But the coconut is also a symbol of resilience, Samar. Even in the conditions where there's very little nourishment and even less nurturance, it flourishes, growing taller than most of the plants around it. ~ Neesha Meminger