Quotes About Emotions

Intimacy requires vulnerability and a lack of defensiveness. Intimacy requires healthy shame.

SHAME—THE MASTER EMOTION Shame has been called the master emotion because as it is internalized-all the other emotions are bound by shame. Emotionally shame-bound parents cannot allow their children to have emotions because the child's emotions triggers the parents' emotions. Repressed emotions often feel too big, like they would completely overwhelm us if we expressed them. There is also the fear of the shame that would be triggered if we expressed our emotions.

Anger is often blocked from conscious awareness and converted into more tolerable or family-authorized feelings, such as hurt or guilt. The person feeling anger no longer feels it; he feels the acceptable feeling.

There is also enmeshment and boundary confusion between the daughter and mother. The daughter is often carrying the mother's repressed anger and sadness about the father. This feels overwhelming since these are deeply repressed emotions. Therefore, to starve and avoid eating is a protection against feeling these overwhelming emotions.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We humans are finite, "perfectly imperfect." Limitation is our essential nature. Grave problems result from refusing to accept our limits. Healthy shame is an emotion that teaches us about our limits. Like all emotions, shame moves us to get our basic needs met.

When emotional energy blocks the resolution of trauma, the mind itself becomes diminished in its ability to function.

The spiritual wound can be healed. But it must be done by grieving, and that is painful.

The wounded inner child is filled with unresolved energy resulting from the sadness of childhood trauma. One of the reasons we have sadness is to complete painful events of the past, so that our energy can be available for the present.

Emotions are a form of thinking, and blocked emotions bias thinking. As emotions get bound by shame, their energy is frozen, which blocks the full interaction between the mind and the will.

When we are exposed without any way to protect ourselves, we feel the pain of shame. If we are continually overexposed, shame becomes toxic.

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.