Quotes About Authenticity

What I would not have given to be that young at this time and to be able to experience such unashamed honesty.

E só naquele momento, com o dia já quase no fim, a gente finalmente começou a conversar. Era como se fôssemos agentes secretos, mas tivéssemos cansado de tudo e decidido simplesmente abandonar o disfarce. (Cinco)

The wounded inner child contaminates intimacy in relationships because he has no sense of his authentic self. The greatest wound a child can receive is the rejection of his authentic self. When a parent cannot affirm his child's feelings, needs, and desires, he rejects that child's authentic self. Then, a false self must be set up.

To be severed and alienated within oneself also creates a sense of unreality. One may have an all-pervasive sense of never quite belonging, of being on the outside looking in. The condition of inner alienation and isolation is also pervaded by a low-grade chronic depression. This has to do with the sadness of losing one's authentic self. Perhaps the deepest and most devastating aspect of neurotic shame is the rejection of the self by the self.

Playing roles and acting are forms of lying. If a person acts like they really feel and it rocks the boat, they are ostracized. We promote pretense and lying as a cultural way of life. Living this way causes an inner split. It teaches us to hide and cover up our toxic shame. This sends us deeper into isolation and loneliness.

I could not heal my being with my doing. To be who I am is all that matters.

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.

committed to a life of honesty, love and discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to reality.

F. False self—confused identity. Your self-worth depends on your partner's success or failure. When you're not in a relationship, you feel an inner void. You feel responsible for making your partner happy. You take care of people to give yourself an identity. You wear masks, calculate, manipulate and play games. You act out rigid family roles and/or sex roles. When your partner has a stomachache, you take the antacid.

With a false self, intimacy is impossible.

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

These roles not only shame us but they become our refuge of hiding. As we pretend to be real men and women, we can hide the fact that we really don't know who we are. We can mood-alter by playing our role to the hilt. In the mood alteration of being a real man or woman, we can avoid our painful shame.

Once one becomes a false self, one ceases to exist psychologically.

All toxic scripts have the injunction "Don't be you." An injunction shames the authentic self and causes self-rupture.

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.

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.

Because the exposure of self to self lies at the heart of neurotic shame, escape from the self is necessary. The escape from self is accomplished by creating a false self. The false self is always more or less than human. The false self may be a perfectionist or a slob, a family Hero or a family Scapegoat. As the false self is formed, the authentic self goes into hiding. Years later the layers of defense and pretense are so intense that one loses all conscious awareness of who one really is.

The roles are like scripts given out for a play. They prescribe what feelings you can or cannot have. After playing my Hero role for years, I no longer really knew who I was.

The best way to come out of hiding is to find a nonshaming intimate person or social network. The operative word here is "intimate." We have to get on a core, gut level because shame is core, gut level stuff. Toxic shame masks our deepest secrets about ourselves; it embodies our belief that we are essentially defective.

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.

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

Refusing to accept our "real selves," we try to create more powerful false selves, or we give up and become less than human. This results in a lifetime of cover-up and secrecy. This secrecy and hiding is the basic cause of human suffering.