In moments of stress, try to think about beautiful things which are calm and peaceful.

I must keep calm and unmoved In the vicissitudes of life.

I must go back into the silence of communion with my higher Power to recover this calm when it is lost even for one moment.

I will accomplish more by this calmness than by all the activities of a long day.

AT ALL COST I WILL KEEP CALM.

I can solve nothing when I am agitated.

I should keep away from those things that are upsetting emotionally.

I should run on an even keel and not get tipped over by emotional upsets.

I should seek for things that are calm and good and true and stick to these things.

"I pray that I may not argue or contend but merely state calmly what I believe to be true. I pray that I may keep in that state of calmness that comes in faith in my Higher Power's purpose for the world."

If you cannot find the time to stop and smell the fragrance of a flower.

If you are in such a rush that you cannot pause and listen to the song of a bird.

If your life is so full that you cannot rest awhile and hear the ripple of a stream.

If life is such a burden that you cannot hear the beauty in a newborn baby's cry.

Then, dear friend, you have not found time to live.

For it is in such things as these you will find the true meaning of life in all its glory and splendor.

 

the results of one codependent relationship ...

I don't believe Amedeo was ever again able to sleep soundly. There were times when he awoke in the middle of the night screaming and screaming with a voice neither of us recognized as his own.

The excitation-patterns of abuse had been stamped into him for years.

On another colourful occasion, I surreptitiously called the police. When they arrived, I begged them to commit Aldo, I was hysterical, quartered by grief. The two young blue-shirted men were mortified - so kind, and so completely impotent. My mother's signature was required for him to be committed and so the whole deal fell through. She wasn't signing anything.

Aldo knew this. Exuberant in his supremacy, he then delivered one of his most extraordinarily insane monologues to the two men (his eyes rolling back into his head, the bolts in his neck turning, hair sprouting from his palms, lightning forking so dramatically in the background, a raven perched on each of his hunched shoulders, et cetera).

Mother stood and gazed at all of us with minimal recognition, a deliriously and deliberately vacuous monster. She was dressed, I think, in lemon chiffon. New jewels, the usual four-inch-heeled mules. Her son's blood was on the wall (and on the tables, sinks, doors and her husband's hands), but this was irrelevant. Unpleasant truths had no place in her life. Reality was such a bore and anyway, it was nothing to do with her, nothing at all: it wasn't really happening, it was a dream. Her denial mechanism reduced all hate-crimes to a trick of light.

- from The Pure Weight of the Heart by Antonella Gambotto-Burke