Quotes About Awareness

Mrs Hogan and her son Henry, however, lived in the house next door – the former entirely mute, the latter completely blind – and yet between them they monitored our comings and goings with all the efficiency of a government intelligence agency. Like conjoined twins, the two were never seen apart, Henry's arm permanently attached to his mother's as she led him to and from Mass every morning and up and down the street for his evening constitutional.

I can simply tell you that all of us need to be aware that trauma has a twofold potential: it can be the catalyst for creative change or the cause of self-destruction.

Anger is often blocked from conscious awareness and converted into more tolerable or family-authorized feelings, such as hurt or guilt. The person feeling anger no longer feels it; he feels the acceptable feeling.

Healthy shame lets us know that we are limited. It tells us that to be human is to be limited. Actually, humans are essentially limited. Not one of us has, or can ever have, unlimited power.

What is important to note is that we can't know what we don't know. Denial, idealization, repression and dissociation are unconscious survival mechanisms. Because they are unconscious, we lose touch with the shame, hurt and pain they cover up. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations.

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.

our emotions are innate and that "they are only good or evil as the end to which they are used." There is an innate and a learned component to all emotion. "Therefore," Pocaterra writes, "there must be two shames, one natural and free from awareness and the other acquired.

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.

The tremendous effectiveness of change history was discovered by paying attention to how people can distort their internally generated experience and then act on the distortion, forgetting that they created it in the first place.

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

You can't heal what you don't feel.

A covert kind of sexual abuse occurs when Dad or Mom talk about sex in front of the children when the age level of the children is inappropriate.

Our mental life is teeming with thoughts, many of them going on unconsciously and automatically.

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.

Your inner child also needs to learn the difference between expressing a feeling and acting on a feeling.

Take stock, citizen bacillus, Now that there are so many billions of you, Bleeding through your opened veins, Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific Of that by which they may remember you.

It's the beginning of wisdom when you admit you've gone astray.

You can't blame the people who can't hear the warnings; you have to blame the ones who can, and who ignore them.

I am I." "Tat tvam asi.

We're aware of the scale of the planet, so we don't accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what's relayed to us by the TV.

Time entails memory, memory entails conscience, conscience entails thought for the future, which is itself implied by the existence of time.

A little thing, lasting only a second, and the odds were a thousand to one that I might have had my eyes on my cards at the time and missed it. But I didn't, and, in a flash, the air seemed to clear. Some shadow lifted from my brain, and I was looking at the three men with full and absolute recognition.

You will never hear a bird cry or a sheep bleat or a weasel scream.