Henry Cloud

This principle is taught in Scripture: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). In other words, we learn to be loving because we are loved. Grace must come from the outside for us to be able to develop it inside. The opposite side of this truth is that we can't love when we aren't loved. And, taking the thinking further, we can't value or treasure our souls when they haven't been valued or treasured.

Values are sometimes worth living and dying for, and are certainly worth dating and breaking up over.

All of your precious resources - time, energy, talent, passion, and money - should only go to the areas of your life or your business that are best, are fixable, and are indespensable. Otherwise, average sets in and [your life] does not become what it was designed to be.

People who own their lives do not feel guilty when they make choices about where they are going. They take other people into consideration, but when they make choices for the wishes of others, they are choosing out of love, not guilt; to advance a good, not to avoid a bad.

When people are vulnerable to control, they feel that they are selfish for deciding what to do with their own property. In reality, deciding for ourselves is the only way we can ever have true love, for then we are giving freely.

fruit of passive-aggressive people. These people resist demands by indirect tactics. They will not take responsibility for their own choices; instead, they turn around and blame someone else for making them do it. Or they will agree to do things that they don__ really want to do, and then gripe about the person behind her back.

Encourage literally came from "in courage." The courage is put "into" you from outside. Our character and abilities grow through internalizing from others what we do not possess in ourselves.

Sometimes we represent our weakness as if it were bad. We don__ think it__ okay to be weak_We have been injured in many ways and our real self houses all of the evidence of those injuries. The pain, the brokenness and the emotional underdevelopment we all possess is part of who we really are.

Mature, healthy people need other people; they don't isolate themselves...Needing love isn't being immature. Rather, it gives us the energy we need to go out and slay our dragons.

Setting boundaries isn't an alternative to loving your child. It is a means of loving her.

Be careful not to give your child the impression that you love her perfect, performing parts more than you do her mediocre, stumbling parts.

If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you 'do' boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality.

Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.

We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change.

Training moments occur when both parents and children do their jobs. The parent's job is to make the rule. The child's job is to break the rule. The parent then corrects and disciplines. The child breaks the rule again, and the parent manages the consequences and empathy that then turn the rule into reality and internal structure for the child.

Don't go overboard in praising required behavior: 'We have only done our duty' (Luke 17:10). But do go overboard when your child confesses the truth, repents honestly, takes chances, and loves openly. Praise the developing character in your child as it emerges in active, loving, responsible behavior.

Denial of one's need for others is the most common type of defense against bonding. If people come from a situation, whether growing up or later in life, where good, safe relationships were not available to them, they learn to deny that they even want them. Why want what you can't have? They slowly get rid of their awareness of the need.