Quotes About Relationships

When you learn how to re-parent yourself, you will stop attempting to complete the past by setting up others to be your parents.

It is very common for one or both parents in a dysfunctional marriage to bond inappropriately with one of their children. The parents use the child to meet their emotional needs.

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

To develop strong ego boundaries, children need parents with strong boundaries. No shame-based parent has these. Toxic shame greatly damages our boundaries. Without strong boundaries for protection, a child cannot thrive. Having damaged boundaries is like living in a house without locks on the doors.

According to Pia Mellody, when "one parent has a relationship with the child that is more important than the relationship he or she has with the spouse, and that parent has unresolved sexual issues, a strong possibility exists that the child will be emotionally sexually abused.

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.

It is impossible to be intimate if you have no sense of self. How can you share yourself with another if you do not really know who you are? How can anyone know you if you do not know who you really are? One way a person builds a strong sense of self is by developing strong boundaries

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

With a false self, intimacy is impossible.

The Couples Journey

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.

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 trust someone else and experience their love and acceptance, we begin to change our beliefs about ourselves. We learn that we are not bad; we learn that we are lovable and acceptable.

PEER GROUP SHAMING I remember Arnold. He was a brilliant accountant. He had been viciously shamed in high school. His presenting problem was his criticalness of women. No woman was ever good enough. As his relationship with a woman would intensify, Arnold would start finding fault. He was a nitpicker of great expertise. The outcome of all this was that he was forty years old and fairly successful financially but painfully alone.

We must risk reaching out and looking for nonshaming relationships if we are to heal our shame. There is no other way.

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.

Genesis suggests that four relationships were broken by Adam's toxic shame: the relationship with God, the relationship with self, the relationship with brother and neighbor (Cain kills Abel), and the relationship with the world (nature). The Twelve Steps restore those relationships.

The only way a child can develop a sense of self is through a relationship with another. We are "we" before we are "I.

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

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.

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

we find people who are dependent on something outside of themselves in order to have an identity. These are examples of the dis-ease of co-dependence.

The frustration of a child's desire to be loved as a person and to have his love accepted is the greatest trauma that a child can experience.

We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships. But the people making those decisions are keeping them secret, because if they don't they'll lose the leverage they have over their subordinates.