Quotes About Identity

The roles are like scripts given out for a play. They prescribe what feelings you can or cannot have. After playing my Hero role for years, I no longer really knew who I was.

Many fairy tales are symbolic statements about finding our male or female identity. When the developmental process is running smoothly, we eventually outgrow our inner child's literal understanding of these stories and come to grasp their symbolic significance. But

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

Most gays carry an excessive amount of shame, as there is particularly strong and widespread shaming of boys who don't display the traditional masculine traits and behaviors. If you are a gay man or woman, your wounded inner preschooler needs to hear that it is perfectly okay to be who you are.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 The real self has withdrawn from conscious contact and therefore cannot be the object of his esteem.

Refusing to accept our "real selves," we try to create more powerful false selves, or we give up and become less than human. This results in a lifetime of cover-up and secrecy. This secrecy and hiding is the basic cause of human suffering.

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.

In each case one parent is involved with his own dysfunction and the other is co-dependently addicted to him. The children are emotionally abandoned. To make matters worse, they become enmeshed in the covert or overt need to maintain the family's precarious and unhealthy balance. In dysfunctional families, no one gets to be who he is. All are put in service to the needs of the system.

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.

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.

In divorcing salvation from achievement, the Christian had established the priority of being over doing.

Not knowing who you are is the greatest tragedy of all. The rigid family-system roles sealed during adolescence become the most conscious identity you have. In fact, these roles become addictions. By being in the role, you feel that you matter. To let go of the role would be to touch the deep reservoir of toxic shame that binds your original pain, the core of which is the spiritual wound. When you lost your I AMness, you lost your mattering.

Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one's authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically. Children cannot know who they are without reflective mirrors. Mirroring is done by one's primary caregivers and is crucial in the first years of life. Abandonment includes the loss of mirroring. Parents who are shut down emotionally (all shame-based parents) cannot mirror and affirm their children's emotions.

I am I." "Tat tvam asi.

He had many names, but one nature, and this unique nature made him subject to certain laws not binding upon ordinary persons. In a compensatory fashion, he was also free from certain other laws more commonly in force.

And how do men call you?" "I have many names, but one nature. You may call me Mazda, or anything you please.