Quotes About Psychology

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.

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.

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 a person represses over the course of a number of years, intelligence is greatly contaminated and diminished. The frozen patterns become chronic patterns. It is as if the "on" button is stuck and plays all the time. Figure 4.6 shows how little intelligence is left uncontaminated.

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

Now, as your adult gives your wounded inner child permission to disobey your parents' beliefs and rules, your inner child must believe that you have enough power to go against your parents. This power is what Eric Berne called potency

A racket is a family-authorized feeling used to replace an unacceptable and shameful feeling.

Any time a new experience resembles the earlier traumatic experience, the original emotions are triggered and the original anchor is fired.

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed. —Frederick Nietzsche

Whatever we call them, all of us have some voices in our heads. Shame-based people especially have dominant, negative shaming, self-deprecating voices.

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.

If the parent were to let the child express those feelings, it would threaten his own defenses. The parent must stop the child's feelings of neediness and pain so that he doesn't have to feel his own feelings of neediness and pain.

You have no memories of painful events of your childhood; you have a split personality; you depersonalize; you can't remember people's names or even the people you were with two years ago. You are out of touch with your body and your feelings.

Adults who have a wounded inner child who failed to learn this lesson tend to be rigid and absolutist. They think in all-or-nothing extremes.

An immature parent with unresolved issues and repressed shame can also transfer his or her shame to us. This interpersonal transference of shame is referred to as "induced shame.

When children have shame-based parents, they identify with them. This is the first step in the child's internalizing shame because the children carry their parent's shame.

What I now understand is that when a child's development is arrested, when feelings are repressed, especially the feelings of anger and hurt, a person grows up to be an adult with an angry, hurt child inside [them]. This child will spontaneously contaminate the person's adult behavior.

It's natural to worry about physical stuff like weaponry and resources. What we should really worry about is psychological stuff like ideologies and norms. As the UNESCO slogan puts it, "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.

Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way.

we obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us.

Put simply, you can't ask your unconscious a question, and expect a direct answer—a neat, tidy little verbal message.

but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat—a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God

Some feelings don't really go away, they just get avoided.