Quotes from John Bradshaw

Adults who have a wounded inner child who failed to learn this lesson tend to be rigid and absolutist. They think in all-or-nothing extremes.

If you're willing to love and accept yourself unconditionally, you will allow yourself time to just be. You will set aside times when there's nothing you have to do and nowhere you have to go. You will allow yourself solitude, a nourishing time of aloneness. You will take time for hygiene and exercise. You will take time for fun and entertainment. You will take vacations. You will take time to work at your sex life.

Many religious denominations teach the concept of man as wretched and stained with original sin. Original sin as taught by some religious bodies means you are bad from the moment you are born. The teaching of original sin accounts for a lot of the child-rearing practices that are geared toward breaking a child's unruly will and natural propensity toward evil.

An immature parent with unresolved issues and repressed shame can also transfer his or her shame to us. This interpersonal transference of shame is referred to as "induced shame.

Toxic shame is soul murder. Because of it we become other-ated human doings, without an inner life and without inner peace. Shame-based people long for true inner serenity and peace. The spiritual life is an inner life. It cannot be attained on the outside. The spiritual life is its own reward and seeks nothing beyond itself. Once we achieve inner peace and conscious contact, we want to overflow.

Because the roles maintain the balance of the system, they exist for the system. The children give up their own reality to take care of the family system—to keep it whole and balanced. Each form of abandonment breaks the interpersonal bridge and the mutual-intimacy bond. A child is precious and incomparable. Unless treated with value and love, this sense of preciousness and incomparability diminishes. In toxic, internalized shame, it disappears completely.

Closed systems are extremely dangerous because they deself their members and deprive them of self-esteem. Closed systems are dangerous because they allow no feedback. When no new information can be integrated into a system, it feeds upon itself and becomes an absolutizing agent. Its own beliefs become sacred laws; its own rules infallible; its own leaders all-powerful. This is exactly the problem with monarchial patriarchy and the poisonous pedagogy it spawns.

When children have shame-based parents, they identify with them. This is the first step in the child's internalizing shame because the children carry their parent's shame.

A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself.

Where there had only been fearful emptiness Ã¢â'¬Â¦ there is now unfolding a wealth of vitality. This is not a homecoming since this home had never before existed. It is the discovery of home. —ALICE MILLER

The French novelist Léon Bloy once said, "There are places in the heart that do not yet exist; pain must be in order for them to be.

Max exemplifies another route taken by shame-based children in school. Max followed the lead of his shame-based brother and sister. He became a superachiever in school. He was a straight-A student. Superachievement and perfectionism are two of the leading cover-ups for toxic shame. As paradoxical as it may seem, the straight-A student and the F student may both be driven by toxic shame.

What I now understand is that when a child's development is arrested, when feelings are repressed, especially the feelings of anger and hurt, a person grows up to be an adult with an angry, hurt child inside [them]. This child will spontaneously contaminate the person's adult behavior.

In divorcing salvation from achievement, the Christian had established the priority of being over doing.

Not knowing who you are is the greatest tragedy of all. The rigid family-system roles sealed during adolescence become the most conscious identity you have. In fact, these roles become addictions. By being in the role, you feel that you matter. To let go of the role would be to touch the deep reservoir of toxic shame that binds your original pain, the core of which is the spiritual wound. When you lost your I AMness, you lost your mattering.

Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one's authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically. Children cannot know who they are without reflective mirrors. Mirroring is done by one's primary caregivers and is crucial in the first years of life. Abandonment includes the loss of mirroring. Parents who are shut down emotionally (all shame-based parents) cannot mirror and affirm their children's emotions.

One of the great advances of our generation has been the exposure of child abuse. We have come to see that our prevailing rules for raising children shame and violate their uniqueness and their dignity. Such rules have been a part of our emotional endarkenment. Alice Miller has shown with painful clarity how our current parenting rules have aimed at making the child fit the projected image of the parent. They have also enforced the idealization of parents by the wounded child.

It's essential to tell the truth at all times. This will reduce life's pain. Lying distorts reality. All forms of distorted thinking must be corrected.