Quotes from John Bradshaw

The most dominant need that any child has is to gradually move from the complete environmental support of infancy and childhood to the self-support of maturity.

Healthy shame keeps us grounded. It is a yellow light, warning us of our essential limitations. Healthy shame is the basic metaphysical boundary for human beings. It is the emotional energy that signals us that we are not God—that we will make mistakes, that we need help. Healthy shame gives us permission to be human.

When the inner child has been wounded through neglect of his developmental dependency needs, he either isolates and withdraws or clings and becomes enmeshed.

As addiction specialist Patrick Carnes has pointed out, a person who never learned to trust confuses intensity with intimacy, obsession with care, and control with security.

The first developmental task in life is to establish a basic sense of trust. We must learn that the other (Mom, Dad, the world out there) is safe and trustworthy.

Perhaps the deepest and most devastating aspect of neurotic shame is the rejection of the self by the self.

As the shame internalization process took place in your dysfunctional family, your needs became bound by shame. After a while you no longer knew what you needed. There was no way to learn how to ask for what you wanted. As your dependency needs were violated, you came to believe that you couldn't depend on anyone.

It is impossible to be intimate if you have no sense of self. How can you share yourself with another if you do not really know who you are? How can anyone know you if you do not know who you really are? One way a person builds a strong sense of self is by developing strong boundaries

Codependency is a condition wherein one has no inner life. Happiness is on the outside.

With a false self, intimacy is impossible.

1. Self-image disturbance. 2. Difficulty identifying and expressing one's individuated thoughts, wishes and feelings and autonomously regulating self-esteem. 3. Difficulty with self-assertion.

Teach your inner child to check things out. Give him permission to ask lots of questions.

He saw healthy shame as the guardian of our humanness. Shame, he posited, is the emotion that signals our human finitude, our human limits. Unhealthy shame results when we try to be more than human or when we act less than human. This insight was what I needed.

The problem of evil may be more accurately described as the mystery of evil.

The Bible suggests that the origin of human bondage (original sin) is the desire to be other than who we are .

My group ridiculed and made fun of anyone who was not like us, and that comprised almost everyone! People with negative identity drop out and stand on the sidelines of life, making fun of everyone else. In actuality I was terrified of life.

Without the energy of anger, we may become apathetic, a doormat and a people-pleaser. Anger is an emotion that is often confused with behaviors like hitting, screaming and cursing. The latter are behaviors based on judgment. They are not emotions. Angry emotions protect and preserve the individual.

Until this original pain is embraced and worked through, the person cannot recover from the effects of the violation. Without doing their original pain grieving, they cannot find and reclaim their wonder child.

The inner child represents the energy of our feelings and our needs, it's the part Walt Disney understood very well, but while there's very little adult in a child, there's tons of child in an adult

Without any doubt, criminals feel like social outcasts and bear enormous toxic shame.

Emotional abuse is a form of psychological battering. Psychological battering includes all forms of abuse because victims cannot be physically or sexually violated without also being psychologically battered. Emotional violence is involved in all abuse and causes the neglect of developmental dependency needs.

Healthy shame is the psychological foundation of humility. It is the source of spirituality. What I discovered was that shame as a healthy human emotion can be transformed into shame as a state of being. As a state of being shame takes over one's whole identity. To have shame as an identity is to believe that one's being is flawed, that one is defective as a human being. Once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing.

We must give up our delusional false selves and ego defenses to find the vital and precious core of ourselves.

Pocaterra looked at blushing as the external sign of shame and believed that blushing was both the recognition of having made a mistake as well as the desire to make amends. Three hundred years later Darwin would posit blushing as that which distinguishes us from all other animals. Darwin knew that the mother of the blush was shame. For Darwin, shame defines our essential humanity.