Quotes from John Bradshaw

If the parent were to let the child express those feelings, it would threaten his own defenses. The parent must stop the child's feelings of neediness and pain so that he doesn't have to feel his own feelings of neediness and pain.

There is an anonymous saying, "Of all the masks of freedom, discipline (limits) is the hardest to understand." We cannot be truly free without having limits.

Our mental life is teeming with thoughts, many of them going on unconsciously and automatically.

Our healthy shame is nourishing in that it moves us to seek new information and learn new things. Inferiority can be experienced as a healthy limit to our abilities.

Whenever a shame-based person feels his real feelings, he feels ashamed. So, to avoid that pain he numbs out.

Our lives are limited by our beliefs. In my active addiction, I believed that my life and happiness depended on external forces. I made decisions according to that belief. My false belief led me to make wrong choices. I ultimately created the kind of world I believed in.

Firestone came to the conclusion that "appraisals and evaluations from others, when they validate a person's distorted view of himself, tend to arouse an obsessive thought process." Since we are already tortured by our own critical thoughts and self-attacks, we feel very threatened whenever others attack us the same way.

Having damaged boundaries is like living in a house without locks on the doors.

Refusing to accept our "real selves," we try to create more powerful false selves, or we give up and become less than human. This results in a lifetime of cover-up and secrecy. This secrecy and hiding is the basic cause of human suffering.

Total self-love and acceptance is the only foundation for happiness and the love of others.

If we humans are essentially spiritual, then when we are abandoned, abused or enmeshed, we are spiritually violated. Indeed, when our caretakers acted shamelessly, they were playing God. Healthy shame tells us we are finite, limited and prone to mistakes. When our caretakers acted shamelessly, we were forced to carry their shame. Our self-esteem was wounded by that shame. Co-dependence is the outcome of this abuse.

It takes lots of energy and hard work to live a false self. This may be the symbolic meaning of the Biblical statement that after the fall the man and the woman would suffer in their natural activities: the woman in childbirth, the man in his work.

When our e-motions are not mirrored and named, we lose contact with one of our vital human powers. Parents who are out of touch with their own emotions cannot model those emotions for their children. They are out of touch and shut down. They are psychically numb. They are not even aware of what they are feeling. Their children have to unconsciously carry their feelings for them.

Your inner child also needs to learn the difference between expressing a feeling and acting on a feeling.

In each case one parent is involved with his own dysfunction and the other is co-dependently addicted to him. The children are emotionally abandoned. To make matters worse, they become enmeshed in the covert or overt need to maintain the family's precarious and unhealthy balance. In dysfunctional families, no one gets to be who he is. All are put in service to the needs of the system.

Your personality was arrested at an early developmental age. You are an adult, but your emotional age is very young. You look like an adult but feel very childish and needy. You feel like the lifeguard on a crowded beach, but you don't know how to swim.

You have no memories of painful events of your childhood; you have a split personality; you depersonalize; you can't remember people's names or even the people you were with two years ago. You are out of touch with your body and your feelings.

He said that "intellectualizing about our problems is complex but easy, while doing something about them is simple but difficult." Shame-based intellectuals love to analyze.

Feelings of excitement and curiosity become bound in shame, and the child's courage and enthusiasm are severely limited. Toxic shame takes on the face of apathy or cowardice at this stage. Describing the impact of her father's incest, the poet Mary Oliver writes in her poem "Rage": "And you see how the child grows—timidly, crouching in corners.

You stand on the sidelines of life wishing you were a participant. You don't know how to initiate a relationship, a conversation, an activity. You are withdrawn and would rather bear the pangs of being alone than risk interaction. You are not spontaneous. You allow yourself very little excitement or fun.

It tells you that you are responsible for other people's feelings and behavior; it may even tell you that your behavior made someone else sick, as when a father says, "Look what you kids have done, you've made your mother sick!" This results in your having a grandiose sense of responsibility. Toxic guilt is one of the most damaging ways your preschool inner child was wounded.

Children will invest as much energy as is needed to ensure the preservation of family harmony, even if it means sacrificing themselves to do so by developing psychological disorders. —Joel Covitz Emotional Child Abuse

Our schools display an enormous bias in educating the mind rather than the whole person. We place major emphasis on reasoning, logic and math, with almost no concern for emotions, intuition and creativity. Our students become memorizing mimics and dull conformists, rather than exciting and feeling creators.

High school is the time of puberty. And puberty is a time of intense exposure and vulnerability. Whatever toxic shame a person carries from childhood will be tested in high school. Often teenage groups look for a scapegoat, someone everyone can dump and project their shame onto. This was Arnold's fate. He was viciously shamed by his female peer group. This accounted for his problem with women.