Quotes from John Bradshaw

The best way to come out of hiding is to find a nonshaming intimate person or social network. The operative word here is "intimate." We have to get on a core, gut level because shame is core, gut level stuff. Toxic shame masks our deepest secrets about ourselves; it embodies our belief that we are essentially defective.

High achievement is often the result of being driven by toxic shame. Feeling flawed and defective on the inside, I had to prove I was okay by being exceptional on the outside. Everything I did was based on getting authenticated on the outside. My good feelings depended upon achievement.

When we trust someone else and experience their love and acceptance, we begin to change our beliefs about ourselves. We learn that we are not bad; we learn that we are lovable and acceptable.

I agree with John Holt that the true test of intelligence is not what you know or can regurgitate from memory on an exam. It's not what you know how to do, but "what you do when you don't know what to do." Harold Gardner has convincingly shown that we have eight or nine different kinds of intelligence. Unfortunately we only measure literacy and mathematical intelligence for our IQ.

PEER GROUP SHAMING I remember Arnold. He was a brilliant accountant. He had been viciously shamed in high school. His presenting problem was his criticalness of women. No woman was ever good enough. As his relationship with a woman would intensify, Arnold would start finding fault. He was a nitpicker of great expertise. The outcome of all this was that he was forty years old and fairly successful financially but painfully alone.

True love is unconditional positive regard. Unconditional positive regard allows us to be whole and accept all the parts of ourselves. To be whole we must reunite all the shamed and split-off aspects of ourselves.

The tremendous effectiveness of change history was discovered by paying attention to how people can distort their internally generated experience and then act on the distortion, forgetting that they created it in the first place.

The person feels bad and acts upon that feeling as if it were really a fact.

I know what I really want for Christmas. I want my childhood back. Nobody is going to give me that.… I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to happen.

Virginia Satir speaks of the five freedoms that accrue when one is loved unconditionally. These freedoms involve our basic powers. These are the power to perceive, the power to love (choose and want), the power to emote, the power to think and express, and the power to envision or imagine.

This transformation involves three dynamics: 1. The identification with shame-based models and the carrying of their unexpressed shame. 2. The trauma of abandonment and the shame binding all one's feelings, needs and drives. 3. The interconnection and magnification of visual memories or scenes, and the retaining of shaming auditory and kinesthetic imprints.

With change history you use the potency of your adult experiences to change the internal imprints from the past.

When we are loved unconditionally, i.e., accepted just as we are, we can then accept ourselves just as we are. Self-acceptance overcomes the self-rupture of toxic shame. Self-acceptance is the way to gain our personal power. When we accept ourselves, we are unified; all our energy is centered and flows outward.

We must risk reaching out and looking for nonshaming relationships if we are to heal our shame. There is no other way.

Any time a new experience resembles the earlier traumatic experience, the original emotions are triggered and the original anchor is fired.

Remember that toxic shame is the root of all addiction. Twelve Step groups literally were born out of the courage of two people risking coming out of hiding. One alcoholic person (Bill W.) turned to another alcoholic person (Dr. Bob) and they told each other how bad they really felt about themselves.

When the fear, hurt and loneliness of the shame in a dysfunctional family reaches high levels of intensity, one person, often the most sensitive, becomes the family Scapegoat. The function of this role is to lessen the pain all the members are in.

Songs are perhaps the most powerful auditory anchors. I'll bet you've experienced riding in your car listening to the radio and suddenly you remembered a person or scene from long ago. Our whole lives are an accumulation of such anchored imprints—pleasant as well as painful.

I've added a few I haven't mentioned. Notice that all the roles cover up the shame-based inner core. As each member of the system plays his rigid role, the system stays frozen and unchanging. Dysfunctional families are frozen in a trancelike state. The shame-core keeps the system frozen. Everyone is in hiding. The roles cover up each person's true and authentic self.

If you didn't get your infancy needs met, if you were a Lost Child, you can give yourself a new infancy. You can do this by anchoring actual experiences relating to the strengths you have now.

When shame is toxic, it is an excruciatingly internal experience of unexpected exposure. It is a deep cut felt primarily from the inside. It divides us from ourselves and from others. When our feeling of shame becomes toxic shame, we disown ourselves. And this disowning demands a cover-up. Toxic shame parades in many garbs and get-ups. It loves darkness and secretiveness. It is the dark, secret aspect of shame that has evaded our study.

Your addiction has been your false secure base—your primary relationship. You have to give up your false idol if you want to rejoin the human race. Healing your toxic shame demands that you surrender to your powerlessness over it.

What a perfectionistic system creates is a "how to get it right" behavioral script. In such a script one is taught how to act loving and righteous. It's actually more important to act loving and righteous than to be loving and righteous. The feeling of righteousness and acting sanctimoniously are wonderful ways to mood-alter toxic shame. They are often ways to interpersonally transfer one's shame to others.

To be committed to life as growth and overcoming is to be willing to accept suffering and risk pain.