Quotes from John Bradshaw

We must give up our delusional false selves and ego defenses to find the vital and precious core of ourselves. In our neurotic shame lies our vulnerable and sensitive self. We must embrace the darkness to find the light. Hidden in the dark reservoirs of our toxic shame lives our true self.

A very young child cannot understand that his dad is a sick alcoholic. Children are limited in logical ability. Their earliest way of thinking is through feelings (felt thought). Children are also egocentric. This doesn't mean they are selfish in the usual meaning of that word. They are not morally selfish. Egocentric thinking means that a child will take everything personally. Even if a parent dies, a child can personalize it.

If we had a caregiver who was mostly predictable, and who touched us and mirrored all our behaviors, we developed a sense of basic trust. When security and trust are present, we begin to develop an interpersonal bond, which forms a bridge of empathic mutuality. Such a bridge is crucial for the development of self-worth. The only way a child can develop a sense of self is through a relationship with another. We are "we" before we are "I.

Minerva never knew she had other choices. She was lost in a mystified relationship with her father substitute bosses at work. In always trying to do the right thing and please her bosses, she was reenacting her original relationship with her insensitive, unavailable father. Many people reenact their mystified source relationships at work. Their offices become exact replicas of their family of origin. I will have more to say about this later.

Having lost heart, they believe they must manipulate in order to get their needs met.

Many fairy tales are symbolic statements about finding our male or female identity. When the developmental process is running smoothly, we eventually outgrow our inner child's literal understanding of these stories and come to grasp their symbolic significance. But

Infants who are not touched and interacted with die of a kind of stroke deprivation called "mirasmus." Marcel Geber, who went on a United Nations commission to study protein deficiency in Ugandan children, found their infants and toddlers to be the most advanced children in the world. It seems that the infants were continually held by the Ugandan mothers. Their bodies were in continuous contact and movement.

Perfectionism or Anomie. Always be right in everything you do. The perfectionist rule always involves an imposed measurement. The fear and avoidance of the negative is the organizing principle of life. The members live according to an externalized image. No one ever measures up. In the less-than-human family, there are no rules—the children have no structure to guide them.

Shame is the master emotion because it binds all the other emotions. Freely expressing our feelings is like thawing out. As shame binds all our feelings, we become psychologically numb.

Blame. Whenever things don't turn out as planned, blame yourself or others. Blame is another defensive cover-up for shame. Blame maintains the balance in a dysfunctional system when control has broken down.

The poisonous pedagogy is transmitted multi-generationally as a sacred body of truth.

Our feelings are who we are at any given moment. When we are numb to our emotions, we lose contact with who we are.

Most gays carry an excessive amount of shame, as there is particularly strong and widespread shaming of boys who don't display the traditional masculine traits and behaviors. If you are a gay man or woman, your wounded inner preschooler needs to hear that it is perfectly okay to be who you are.

You can't heal what you don't feel.

Only in the life of dialogue and community can we truly live and grow.

Genesis suggests that four relationships were broken by Adam's toxic shame: the relationship with God, the relationship with self, the relationship with brother and neighbor (Cain kills Abel), and the relationship with the world (nature). The Twelve Steps restore those relationships.

Laing spent his life exposing the destructive identity confusion that results when we become acceptable to others only by denying our own truth. He called this identity confusion mystification.

We have no alternative. We must break the sacred rule and question these rules because unless we talk about them, there is no way out. We must evaluate them in the light of our newfound knowledge of families as systems.

Shame-based people also do not believe they have the right to depend on anyone.

The only way a child can develop a sense of self is through a relationship with another.

Families are as sick as their toxic shame secrets.

Shame is the affect which is the source of many complex and disturbing inner states: depression, alienation, self doubt, isolating loneliness, paranoid and schizoid phenomena, compulsive disorders, splitting of the self, perfectionism, a deep sense of inferiority, inadequacy or failure, the so-called borderline conditions and disorders of narcissism.

The only way a child can develop a sense of self is through a relationship with another. We are "we" before we are "I.

If we are essentially a mistake, flawed and defective, then there's nothing we can do about it.