Quotes from John Bradshaw

The most important skills he has to learn are those of socialization: cooperation, interdependence, and a healthy sense of competition. The preparation of one's life work requires academic skills as well: reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, these skills should not have been more important than knowing, loving, and valuing oneself. In fact, a healthy sense of self-worth is essential for good learning.

Both are driven to cover up their deep sense of self-rupture, the hole in their soul. They may cover up in ways that look polar opposite, but each is still driven by neurotic shame. In fact, the most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.

This means that shame monitors excitement and pleasure. Nature has made the sexual experience the most exciting and pleasurable of all our experiences. Nature wants us to mate and procreate. Sex and shame go hand in hand because we need our sense of shame as a boundary for our sexual desires.

Hell, in my opinion, is never finding your true self and never living your own life or knowing who you are. This is the fate that lies at the end of the journey of ever-deepening toxic shame.

We heal our toxic shame when we grasp that our "adult child" issues are about what happened to us, and not about who we really are!

Such a person does not have his healthy guilt (moral shame) available to him. Healthy guilt would say, "I made a mistake or a blunder, and I can repair that blunder." When a person's guilt has become neurotic, it becomes an "immorality shame.

we are spiritual beings who need an earthly journey to become fully spiritual.

NEED SHAME BINDS When these needs are neglected, children are given the message that their needs are not important, and they lose a sense of their own personal value. They are not worth someone being there for them. They get the feeling they do not matter. As their needs are chronically rejected, children stop believing they have the right to depend on anyone.

The Couples Journey

My belief is that recovery from childhood abandonment, neglect, and abuse is a process, not an event. Reading this book and doing the exercises will not make all your problems disappear overnight. But I guarantee that you'll discover a delightful little person within yourself. You will be able to listen to that child's anger and sadness and to celebrate life with your inner child in a more joyous, creative, and playful way.

Script messages tell us the way we are or what role we are supposed to play in life. They shame who we authentically are and create self-rupture.

A toxically shamed person is divided within himself and must create a false-self cover-up to hide his sense of being flawed and defective. You cannot offer yourself to another person if you do not know who you really are.

Toxic shame, with its more-than-human, less-than-human polarization, is either inhuman or dehumanizing. The demand for a false self to cover and hide the authentic self necessitates a life dominated by doing and achievement. Everything depends on performance and achievement rather than on being. Being requires no measurement; it is its own justification. Being is grounded in an inner life that grows in richness.

The fantasy bond is an illusion of connectedness that the child creates in relation to the primary caregiver, who is shaming her. Paradoxically, the more a child is violated, the more she creates the fantasy bond. Bonding to abuse is one of the most perplexing aspects of shame inducement.

Tôi có quy?n tin b?t c? Ä'i?u gì tôi th?y tin. Tôi ch? c?n ch?p nh?n h?u qu? cho ni?m tin c?a mình.

What I couldn't grasp is that there is no way to change your being by your doing. The shame-based core cries out, "You're flawed and defective! There's something wrong with you!" All the doing in the world won't change that.

The grief work has to be done. Fritz Perls said: "Nothing changes till it becomes what it is." Only by demythologizing our parents can we grasp the real harm that was done to us. To grasp that real harm was done to us allows us to own our feelings about being violated. To feel the feelings is the original pain work. Once we've connected with and expressed those feelings, we are free to move on.

Toxic shame is spiritual bankruptcy.

Toxic shame feels irremediable: If I am flawed, defective and a mistake, then there is nothing that can be done about me. Such a belief leads to impotence. How can I change who I am? Toxic shame also has the quality of circularity. Shame begets shame.

My new book on moral intelligence calls these patriarchies "cultures of obedience," and presents an ethics of virtues as a way to avoid such moral totalism.

But when the feeling of shame is violated by a coercive and perfectionistic religion and culture—especially by shame-based source figures who mediate religion and culture—it becomes an all-embracing identity. 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.

When we are not allowed to grieve, the energy is frozen. One of the rules of dysfunctional families is the no feel rule. This rule prohibited your inner child from even knowing what he was feeling. Another dysfunctional family rule is the no talk rule, which states that the expression of emotions is prohibited.

Being requires no measurement; it is its own justification. Being is grounded in an inner life that grows in richness. "The kingdom of heaven is within," says the Scripture. Toxic shame looks to the outside for happiness and validation, since the inside is flawed and defective. Toxic shame is spiritual bankruptcy.

When a person represses over the course of a number of years, intelligence is greatly contaminated and diminished. The frozen patterns become chronic patterns. It is as if the "on" button is stuck and plays all the time. Figure 4.6 shows how little intelligence is left uncontaminated.