Defensive devaluation is a protective device that makes love bad, trust unimportant and people "no darn good any way". People who have been deeply hurt in their relationships will often devalue love so it doesn't hurt so much. And they often become resigned to never loving again.

You can't always rely on taking the pain. You need to learn to avoid it.

A person must face the root cause of their relentless personal pain. Irrespective of whatever bricks buttress our youthful personal philosophy, pain avoidance, and pain therapy are likely two of its foundation stones.

The world of reality exists. The world of fantasy exists. The great boundary between the world of reality and the world of fantasy is the boundary of pleasure and fallacy. So many people enter into the world of realities through the the gate of betrayal and pain of the world of fantasies. If you live in the world of fantasies, ponder!If you live in the world of realities, learn and use your lessons.

In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.

Embrace those parts of yourself that you've skillfully avoided until now. That's your true adventure.

Reasoning with senselessness will never build faith. Faith is strengthened when you stop collecting fragmented signs and questionable hunches, in order to build an acceptable reason for your wrong decisions and less than desirable circumstances.

Many of us learned that keeping busy…kept us at a distance from our feelings...Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves—becoming overachievers & workaholics—as self esteem…But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice…If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive activity.

I found myself in a pattern of being attracted to people who were somehow unavailable, and what I realized was that I was protecting myself because I equate the idea of connection and love with trauma and death.