Quotes About Emotions

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.

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.

our emotions are innate and that "they are only good or evil as the end to which they are used." There is an innate and a learned component to all emotion. "Therefore," Pocaterra writes, "there must be two shames, one natural and free from awareness and the other acquired.

When Herkamer tells her he hates her, she cries, telling him that maybe someday she won't be home when he wants her. Poor Herkamer is devastated. His abandonment, terror and separation anxiety are triggered. He rushes to his mom, feeling terrible guilt. His awareness of his anger is completely lost. His anger has been converted into guilt.

When we are shame-based, we can only focus on our own ache.

I know what I really want for Christmas. I want my childhood back. Nobody is going to give me that.… I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to happen.

Any time a new experience resembles the earlier traumatic experience, the original emotions are triggered and the original anchor is fired.

Songs are perhaps the most powerful auditory anchors. I'll bet you've experienced riding in your car listening to the radio and suddenly you remembered a person or scene from long ago. Our whole lives are an accumulation of such anchored imprints—pleasant as well as painful.

Shame is the master emotion because it binds all the other emotions. Freely expressing our feelings is like thawing out. As shame binds all our feelings, we become psychologically numb.

Our feelings are who we are at any given moment. When we are numb to our emotions, we lose contact with who we are.

You can't heal what you don't feel.

Families are as sick as their toxic shame secrets.

There is almost always low-grade anger and depression in a dysfunctional family.

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed. —Frederick Nietzsche

Whatever we call them, all of us have some voices in our heads. Shame-based people especially have dominant, negative shaming, self-deprecating voices.

One of the things we know about grief resolution is that grief is one of the only problems in the world that will heal itself with support." (For a clear and concise discussion of unresolved grief read After the Tears by Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell.)

Mourning is the ultimate work of the externalization process. Mourning is the only way to heal our unmet developmental dependency needs. Since we cannot go back in time and be children and get our needs met from our very own parents, we must grieve the loss of our childhood self and our childhood dependency needs. Grief is a complex process that involves a range of human emotions.

For example, a chronically depressed man who becomes a superachieving executive through his work addiction can feel only when he is working. An alcoholic or drug addict feels high with mood-altering drugs. A food addict feels a sense of fullness and well-being when his stomach is full. Each addiction allows the person to feel good feelings or to avoid painful ones.

If the parent were to let the child express those feelings, it would threaten his own defenses. The parent must stop the child's feelings of neediness and pain so that he doesn't have to feel his own feelings of neediness and pain.

Whenever a shame-based person feels his real feelings, he feels ashamed. So, to avoid that pain he numbs out.

When our e-motions are not mirrored and named, we lose contact with one of our vital human powers. Parents who are out of touch with their own emotions cannot model those emotions for their children. They are out of touch and shut down. They are psychically numb. They are not even aware of what they are feeling. Their children have to unconsciously carry their feelings for them.

Your inner child also needs to learn the difference between expressing a feeling and acting on a feeling.

You have no memories of painful events of your childhood; you have a split personality; you depersonalize; you can't remember people's names or even the people you were with two years ago. You are out of touch with your body and your feelings.

Our schools display an enormous bias in educating the mind rather than the whole person. We place major emphasis on reasoning, logic and math, with almost no concern for emotions, intuition and creativity. Our students become memorizing mimics and dull conformists, rather than exciting and feeling creators.