Quotes About Self

With a false self, intimacy is impossible.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Laing spent his life exposing the destructive identity confusion that results when we become acceptable to others only by denying our own truth. He called this identity confusion mystification.

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

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.

Children who are not loved in their very beingness do not know how to love themselves. As adults, they have to learn to nourish, to mother their own lost child.

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 Bible suggests that Adam was not satisfied with his own being. He wanted to be more than he was. He wanted to be more than human. He failed to accept his essential limitations. He lost his healthy shame. The Bible suggests that the origin of human bondage (original sin) is the desire to be other than who we are . . . to be more than human. In his toxic shame (pride), Adam wanted a false self. The false self led to his destruction.

The shame is internalized. Shame is no longer a feeling; it is an identity. The real self has withdrawn from conscious contact and therefore cannot be the object of his esteem.

It takes lots of energy and hard work to live a false self. This may be the symbolic meaning of the Biblical statement that after the fall the man and the woman would suffer in their natural activities: the woman in childbirth, the man in his work.

A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself.

it is difficult to discern where "you" end and the remainder of the world begins.

I am I." "Tat tvam asi.

I have many names, but only one nature

when you talk of your journey and of what you have heard and seen, you inwardly desire your own glory in all you do and say. All

To lead yourself, use your head; to lead others, use your heart.