Best 10 quotes of Virginia M. Axline on MyQuotes

...even though we do not have the wisdom to enumerate the reasons for the behaviour of another person, we can grant that every individual does have his private world of meaning, conceived out of the integrity and dignity of his personality.

He had learned to understand his feelings. He had learned how to cope with them and to control them. Dibs was no longer submerged under his feelings of fear, anger, hatred and guilt. He had become a person in his own right. He found a sense of dignity and self-respect.

He was exchanging his anger and fear and anxiety for hope and confidence and gladness.

His search for self was a tedious troubled experience that brought him increasing awareness of his feelings, attitudes and relationship with those around him. There were many feelings that Dibs had not dug out of his past and flung out in his play to know and understand and control better.

Now that he had encountered concrete evidence of is changing world it would be important to work with his reactions to it- not with reassurance, not with lengthy explanations or apologies, not with words, words, words, thrown at him as a substitute, but with the experience he might now have to take a measure of his own ability to cope with a changing world.

Perhaps he felt safer in manipulating intellectual concepts about things, rather than probing any deeper feelings about himself that he could not accept with ease.

Sometimes it is very difficult to keep in mind the fact that the parents, too, have reasons for what they do-- have reasons, locked in the depths of their personalities, for their inability to love, to understand, to give of themselves to their children.

The feelings of hostility and revenge that he expressed towards still flared up briefly, but they did not burn with hatred or fear.

They left together - a little boy who had the opprtunity to state himself through his play and who had emerged a happy, capable child, and a mother who had grown in understanding and appreciation for her very gifted child. A child, given the opportunity, has the gift of honest, forthright communication. A mother who is respected and accepted with dignity can also be sincerely expressive when she knows that she will not be criticized and blamed.

What would ultimately help Dibs the most was not the sand mountain, not the powerful, little plastic duck, but the feeling of security and adequacy that they symbolized in the creation he had built last week. Now, faced with the disappearance of the concrete symbols, I hoped that he could experience within himself confidence and adequacy as he coped now with his disappointment and realization that things outside ourselves change - and many times we have little control over those elements, but if we learn to utilize our inner resources, we carry our security around with us.