Quotes About Vulnerability

To be shame-bound means that whenever you feel any feeling, need or drive, you immediately feel ashamed.

Hypervigilant and fear of losing control. You live in a state of readiness for attack. You feel jumpy and are easily startled. You have attacks of sudden fear or panic. You fear losing control.

Control madness causes severe relationship problems. There is no way to be intimate with a partner who distrusts you. Intimacy demands that each partner accept the other just the way he or she is.

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.

With a false self, intimacy is impossible.

The inner child represents the energy of our feelings and our needs, it's the part Walt Disney understood very well, but while there's very little adult in a child, there's tons of child in an adult

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

When we are exposed without any way to protect ourselves, we feel the pain of shame. If we are continually overexposed, shame becomes toxic.

Shyness can become a serious problem when it is rooted in toxic shame.

Toxic shame results from the unexpected exposure of vulnerable aspects of a child's self. This exposure takes place before the child has any ego boundaries to protect herself. Early shaming events happen in a context where the child has no ability to choose. The felt experience of shame is being exposed and seen when one is not ready to be seen.

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 is spiritual bankruptcy.

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

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

In order to be healed we must come out of isolation and hiding. This means finding a person, or ideally a group of significant others, whom we are willing to trust. This is tough for shame-based people.

Shame becomes toxic because of premature exposure. We are exposed either unexpectedly or before we are ready to be exposed. We feel helpless and powerless. No wonder then that we fear the scrutinizing eyes of others. However, the only way out of toxic shame is to embrace the shame—we must come out of hiding.

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.

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.

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

Remember that toxic shame is the root of all addiction. Twelve Step groups literally were born out of the courage of two people risking coming out of hiding. One alcoholic person (Bill W.) turned to another alcoholic person (Dr. Bob) and they told each other how bad they really felt about themselves.

We must give up our delusional false selves and ego defenses to find the vital and precious core of ourselves. In our neurotic shame lies our vulnerable and sensitive self. We must embrace the darkness to find the light. Hidden in the dark reservoirs of our toxic shame lives our true self.

Having lost heart, they believe they must manipulate in order to get their needs met.

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.

Shame-based people also do not believe they have the right to depend on anyone.