Quotes About Self-awareness

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

Eating disorders. You don't know when you feel empty or hungry. You eat to fill up. You eat to feel full.

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.

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

The latter quality, being one's own locus of evaluation, means that one has a sense of satisfaction with himself.

Healthy shame keeps us grounded. It is a yellow light, warning us of our essential limitations. 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.

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

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.

Looking at Yourself Through the Eyes of Your Higher Power

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

Both are driven to cover up their deep sense of self-rupture, the hole in their soul. They may cover up in ways that look polar opposite, but each is still driven by neurotic shame. In fact, the most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.

We heal our toxic shame when we grasp that our "adult child" issues are about what happened to us, and not about who we really are!

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.

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.

What I couldn't grasp is that there is no way to change your being by your doing. The shame-based core cries out, "You're flawed and defective! There's something wrong with you!" All the doing in the world won't change that.

Once an emotion is toxically shame bound, one feels numb. The emotional avoidance is sealed by learning to avoid the avoidance.

The first decision adult children who want to grow up need to make is to surrender.

Blame. Whenever things don't turn out as planned, blame yourself or others. Blame is another defensive cover-up for shame. Blame maintains the balance in a dysfunctional system when control has broken down.

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

The only way a child can develop a sense of self is through a relationship with another.

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

If we are essentially a mistake, flawed and defective, then there's nothing we can do about it.

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.