Quotes from John Bradshaw

Healthy shame lets us know that we are limited. It tells us that to be human is to be limited. Actually, humans are essentially limited. Not one of us has, or can ever have, unlimited power.

When we think we are absolutely right, we stop seeking new information. To be right is to be certain, and to be certain stops us from being curious.

In Bradshaw On: The Family, society itself is seen as a sick family system built on the rules of the poisonous pedagogy. These rules deny emotions. This sets us up for the psychic numbing that leads to addiction. These rules of the poisionous pedagogy come from the time of kings. They are nondemocratic and based on a kind of master-slave inequality. They promote obsessive orderliness and obedience.

Playing roles and acting are forms of lying. If people act like they really feel and it rocks the boat, they are ostracized. We promote pretense and lying as a cultural way of life. Living this way causes an inner split. It teaches us to hide and cover up our toxic shame. This sends us deeper into isolation and loneliness.

These authors posit that a value is not a value unless it has seven elements. They are: 1. It must be chosen. 2. There must be alternatives. 3. You must know the consequences of your choice. 4. Once chosen you prize and cherish it. 5. You are willing to publicly proclaim it. 6. You act on this value. 7. You act on it consistently and repeatedly.

It is some bit of my father I keep not seeing. I cannot remember years of my childhood. Some parts of me I cannot find now.… Is there enough left of me now to be honest?…

We need to teach our inner child that problems are normal and that he must accept them.

According to Pia Mellody, when "one parent has a relationship with the child that is more important than the relationship he or she has with the spouse, and that parent has unresolved sexual issues, a strong possibility exists that the child will be emotionally sexually abused.

Montagu argues that the human species was designed to develop "in ways that emphasize rather than minimize the childlike traits." The human child naturally loves, is nonjudgmental, friendly, spontaneous, curious, open to new learning, etc. We cannot recover our innocence, our childlike qualities, until we have reclaimed and championed our Inner Child.

Richard Bandler suggested that one of the major blocks to creativity was the feeling of knowing you are right.

Besides lack of mirroring, abandonment includes: neglect of developmental dependency needs, abuse of any kind and enmeshment into the covert or overt needs of the parents or the family system. Abandonment induces shame in the child who is utterly dependent on the parents.

To be shame-bound means that whenever you feel any feeling, need or drive, you immediately feel ashamed.

What is important to note is that we can't know what we don't know. Denial, idealization, repression and dissociation are unconscious survival mechanisms. Because they are unconscious, we lose touch with the shame, hurt and pain they cover up. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations.

if you were never allowed to express anger in your family, your anger becomes an alienated part of yourself. You experience toxic shame when you feel angry. This part of you must be disowned or severed. There is no way to get rid of your emotional power of anger. Anger is self-preserving and self-protecting energy. Without this energy you become a doormat and a people-pleaser. As your feelings, needs and drives are bound by toxic shame, more and more of you is alienated.

The latter quality, being one's own locus of evaluation, means that one has a sense of satisfaction with himself.

Hypervigilant and fear of losing control. You live in a state of readiness for attack. You feel jumpy and are easily startled. You have attacks of sudden fear or panic. You fear losing control.

L. Lack of coping skills (underlearning). You never learned how to do many things necessary for a fully functional life. Your methods of problem-solving do not work, but you continue to use the same ones over and over. You learned ways of caring for your wounds that, in fact, perpetuated them. You have no real knowledge of what is normal. Your bottom-line tolerance is quite abnormal.

see, hear, etc ………… (senses) I interpret …………… (mind, thinking) I feel …………… (emotions) I want …………… (desires)

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

F. False self—confused identity. Your self-worth depends on your partner's success or failure. When you're not in a relationship, you feel an inner void. You feel responsible for making your partner happy. You take care of people to give yourself an identity. You wear masks, calculate, manipulate and play games. You act out rigid family roles and/or sex roles. When your partner has a stomachache, you take the antacid.

His daughters especially were a source of nurturing. Never once did I see any of his children express anger, hurt or resentment toward Max. They had never connected with their own feelings. Max would become enraged when I spoke of his reenactment of his abandonment on his own children. His children minimized the impact of their lonely childhood. This is the delusional nature of deprived narcissism

The very characteristics of childhood I am describing—wonder, dependency, curiosity, optimism—are crucial to the growth and flowering of human life.

The unlimited power that many modern gurus offer is false hope. Their programs calling us to unlimited power have made them rich, not us. They touch our false selves and tap our toxic shame. We humans are finite, "perfectly imperfect." Limitation is our essential nature. Grave problems result from refusing to accept our limits.

Control madness causes severe relationship problems. There is no way to be intimate with a partner who distrusts you. Intimacy demands that each partner accept the other just the way he or she is.