Quotes About Family

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.

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.

SHAME-BASED MARRIAGE AND PARENTAL MODELS It is obvious that a major source of toxic shame is the family system and its multigenerational patterns of unresolved secrets. More specifically, these families are created by the shame-based people who find and marry each other. Each expects the other to parent the child within him or her. Each is incomplete and insatiable. The insatiability is rooted in each person's unmet childhood needs.

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.

The more dysfunctional the system, the more closed and rigid are the roles it assigns. In families that are chemically, sexually or violently dysfunctional, the needs of the system are overt. The system dispenses its roles for the members to play in order to keep balance. All the rigid roles set up by family dysfunction are forms of abandonment.

Addiction is the central organizing principle of the family system—maintaining the system as well as the shame. When we address addiction in families, we open the door to the families' shame.

A racket is a family-authorized feeling used to replace an unacceptable and shameful feeling.

When the fear, hurt and loneliness of the shame in a dysfunctional family reaches high levels of intensity, one person, often the most sensitive, becomes the family Scapegoat. The function of this role is to lessen the pain all the members are in.

I've added a few I haven't mentioned. Notice that all the roles cover up the shame-based inner core. As each member of the system plays his rigid role, the system stays frozen and unchanging. Dysfunctional families are frozen in a trancelike state. The shame-core keeps the system frozen. Everyone is in hiding. The roles cover up each person's true and authentic self.

Minerva never knew she had other choices. She was lost in a mystified relationship with her father substitute bosses at work. In always trying to do the right thing and please her bosses, she was reenacting her original relationship with her insensitive, unavailable father. Many people reenact their mystified source relationships at work. Their offices become exact replicas of their family of origin. I will have more to say about this later.

The poisonous pedagogy is transmitted multi-generationally as a sacred body of truth.

Families are as sick as their toxic shame secrets.

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

but each has the same function: to keep the family system in balance, frozen and protected from the possibility of change.

Members of dysfunctional families give up their ego boundaries as a way to maintain the family system. Giving up ego boundaries is equivalent to giving up your identity.

A covert kind of sexual abuse occurs when Dad or Mom talk about sex in front of the children when the age level of the children is inappropriate.

As society is modeled after the monarchial patriarchal families we grow up in, society itself becomes a dysfunctioning family system.

The more emotionally deprived a person has been, the stronger his fantasy bond. And paradoxical as it sounds, the more a person has been abandoned, the more he tends to cling to and idealize his family and his parents. Idealizing parents also extends to the way they raised you.

In each case one parent is involved with his own dysfunction and the other is co-dependently addicted to him. The children are emotionally abandoned. To make matters worse, they become enmeshed in the covert or overt need to maintain the family's precarious and unhealthy balance. In dysfunctional families, no one gets to be who he is. All are put in service to the needs of the system.

Children will invest as much energy as is needed to ensure the preservation of family harmony, even if it means sacrificing themselves to do so by developing psychological disorders. —Joel Covitz Emotional Child Abuse

An immature parent with unresolved issues and repressed shame can also transfer his or her shame to us. This interpersonal transference of shame is referred to as "induced shame.

Because the roles maintain the balance of the system, they exist for the system. The children give up their own reality to take care of the family system—to keep it whole and balanced. Each form of abandonment breaks the interpersonal bridge and the mutual-intimacy bond. A child is precious and incomparable. Unless treated with value and love, this sense of preciousness and incomparability diminishes. In toxic, internalized shame, it disappears completely.

When children have shame-based parents, they identify with them. This is the first step in the child's internalizing shame because the children carry their parent's shame.

Not knowing who you are is the greatest tragedy of all. The rigid family-system roles sealed during adolescence become the most conscious identity you have. In fact, these roles become addictions. By being in the role, you feel that you matter. To let go of the role would be to touch the deep reservoir of toxic shame that binds your original pain, the core of which is the spiritual wound. When you lost your I AMness, you lost your mattering.