Quotes from John Bradshaw

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same. —Carlos Castaneda Don Juan, Journey to Ixtlan

There is almost always low-grade anger and depression in a dysfunctional family.

A person with internalized shame believes he is inherently flawed, inferior and defective. Such a feeling is so painful that defending scripts (or strategies) are developed to cover it up. These scripts are the roots of violence, criminality, war and all forms of addiction.

but each has the same function: to keep the family system in balance, frozen and protected from the possibility of change.

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed. —Frederick Nietzsche

Whatever we call them, all of us have some voices in our heads. Shame-based people especially have dominant, negative shaming, self-deprecating voices.

One of the things we know about grief resolution is that grief is one of the only problems in the world that will heal itself with support." (For a clear and concise discussion of unresolved grief read After the Tears by Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell.)

The "voice" may be described as the language of an insidious self-destructive process existing, to varying degrees, in every person. The voice represents an external point of view toward oneself initially derived from the parents' suppressed hostile feelings toward the child.

Actually getting rid of the voices is extremely difficult because of the original rupturing of the interpersonal bridge and the resulting fantasy bond. As children are abandoned, and the more severely they are abandoned (neglected, abused, enmeshed), the more they create the illusion of connection with the parent. The illusion is what Robert Firestone calls the "fantasy bond.

Members of dysfunctional families give up their ego boundaries as a way to maintain the family system. Giving up ego boundaries is equivalent to giving up your identity.

Mourning is the ultimate work of the externalization process. Mourning is the only way to heal our unmet developmental dependency needs. Since we cannot go back in time and be children and get our needs met from our very own parents, we must grieve the loss of our childhood self and our childhood dependency needs. Grief is a complex process that involves a range of human emotions.

Nor do we believe that we will not matter if we don't give care to others.

We are not material beings on a spiritual journey; we are spiritual beings who need an earthly journey to become fully spiritual.

Children who are not loved in their very beingness do not know how to love themselves. As adults, they have to learn to nourish, to mother their own lost child.

A covert kind of sexual abuse occurs when Dad or Mom talk about sex in front of the children when the age level of the children is inappropriate.

As society is modeled after the monarchial patriarchal families we grow up in, society itself becomes a dysfunctioning family system.

The fact is, we really never went through the pain. We developed a fantasy bond and used our primary ego defenses to avoid the anger, hurt and pain of our abandonment. Then we avoided our avoidance with our rigid roles and characterological defenses. We missed expressing the feelings at the crucial time.

we find people who are dependent on something outside of themselves in order to have an identity. These are examples of the dis-ease of co-dependence.

Just as the shame-based parents cannot accept their own weaknesses, wants, feelings, vulnerability and dependency needs, they cannot accept their children's neediness, feelings, weakness, vulnerability and dependency. Firestone writes that the voice is the result of the "parents' deeply repressed desire to destroy the aliveness and spontaneity of the child whenever he or she intrudes on their defenses.

The Bible suggests that Adam was not satisfied with his own being. He wanted to be more than he was. He wanted to be more than human. He failed to accept his essential limitations. He lost his healthy shame. The Bible suggests that the origin of human bondage (original sin) is the desire to be other than who we are . . . to be more than human. In his toxic shame (pride), Adam wanted a false self. The false self led to his destruction.

The frustration of a child's desire to be loved as a person and to have his love accepted is the greatest trauma that a child can experience.

The more emotionally deprived a person has been, the stronger his fantasy bond. And paradoxical as it sounds, the more a person has been abandoned, the more he tends to cling to and idealize his family and his parents. Idealizing parents also extends to the way they raised you.

The shame is internalized. Shame is no longer a feeling; it is an identity. The real self has withdrawn from conscious contact and therefore cannot be the object of his esteem.

For example, a chronically depressed man who becomes a superachieving executive through his work addiction can feel only when he is working. An alcoholic or drug addict feels high with mood-altering drugs. A food addict feels a sense of fullness and well-being when his stomach is full. Each addiction allows the person to feel good feelings or to avoid painful ones.