Augusten Burroughs Quotes

If your parents ignored you, or if they are just not emotionally available, or if they yell a lot, that is a type of trauma.

I want to say that nobody accuses their parents of abusing them without justification to do that. I didn't just make it up. A lot of things were true and abusive and horrible things that happened to me that my father did.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I was an abused kid.

Bullies generally were bullied and are hurting inside much more than you could ever imagine.

'Marnie' was ahead of its time. People didn't talk about childhood and its effects on adult life. It was taboo to discuss sexuality and psychology and to put all that into a film was shocking.

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.

I grew up in a very toxic home.

The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.

There was mental and physical abuse in my family.

My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It's just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she's the daughter of alcoholics who'd leave her alone at Christmas time.

When my father would yell at me, I told myself someday I'd use it in a book.

I didn't have a good childhood growing up.

I grew up in a family that was very barbed and difficult, and there was a lot of humor. None of it was painless humor. All of it was at someone else's expense. It was kind of always about power.

I have been driven to the edge by parental alienation for many years now. You have to go through this to understand.

It was hard to feel hated as a child.

I definitely didn't have a happy childhood.

I was in the orphanage in New Orleans until I was almost a year old. I don't think I ever got held by my mama, so that was completely and utterly traumatic. I think it was trauma from the first breath, and I think I've spent my whole life trying to heal from that trauma. So it shaped my brain.

My dad would do horrible things to me, but I was so desperate for his affection and his approval that I would keep coming back.

My mother found herself in a triangular situation of my father and his legitimate wife. I experienced the emotional trauma of that triangle in my cradle.

My childhood was the worst thing on earth. I'm very lucky to have gotten out of that, but I spent 15 years of my life being so incredibly emotionally abused.

I don't know who said it, but it really kind of hit me hard in the stomach: "The only difference between all of us is that some of us were loved and some of us weren't."

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

Many of the twisted minds and crippled characters in the world were made by careless parents who kept their children away from knives and fires, but put permanent scars on their souls.

I never saw my mother happy with me and proud of me for doing something: She only knew me as being a wild kid running the streets, coming home with new clothes that she knew I didn't pay for. I never got a chance to talk to her or know about her. Professionally, it has no effect, but it's crushing emotionally and personally.