Quotes About Connection

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.

It is impossible to be intimate if you have no sense of self. How can you share yourself with another if you do not really know who you are? How can anyone know you if you do not know who you really are? One way a person builds a strong sense of self is by developing strong boundaries

With a false self, intimacy is impossible.

The Couples Journey

The fantasy bond is an illusion of connectedness that the child creates in relation to the primary caregiver, who is shaming her. Paradoxically, the more a child is violated, the more she creates the fantasy bond. Bonding to abuse is one of the most perplexing aspects of shame inducement.

The grief work has to be done. Fritz Perls said: "Nothing changes till it becomes what it is." Only by demythologizing our parents can we grasp the real harm that was done to us. To grasp that real harm was done to us allows us to own our feelings about being violated. To feel the feelings is the original pain work. Once we've connected with and expressed those feelings, we are free to move on.

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.

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.

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.

Infants who are not touched and interacted with die of a kind of stroke deprivation called "mirasmus." Marcel Geber, who went on a United Nations commission to study protein deficiency in Ugandan children, found their infants and toddlers to be the most advanced children in the world. It seems that the infants were continually held by the Ugandan mothers. Their bodies were in continuous contact and movement.

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

Only in the life of dialogue and community can we truly live and grow.

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.

Actually getting rid of the voices is extremely difficult because of the original rupturing of the interpersonal bridge and the resulting fantasy bond. As children are abandoned, and the more severely they are abandoned (neglected, abused, enmeshed), the more they create the illusion of connection with the parent. The illusion is what Robert Firestone calls the "fantasy bond.

Nor do we believe that we will not matter if we don't give care to others.

When our e-motions are not mirrored and named, we lose contact with one of our vital human powers. Parents who are out of touch with their own emotions cannot model those emotions for their children. They are out of touch and shut down. They are psychically numb. They are not even aware of what they are feeling. Their children have to unconsciously carry their feelings for them.

What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will answer me with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been left in them by the great men who have left the books with us.

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

I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We're elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.

I like you very much as a person," he said […] "I think I'm going to like you just as much as a woman." "I hope so," she answered with equal formality. "We may have to go a lot of places together.

gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer.

Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see A man in the clouds, and have him speak to thee?