Quotes About Healing

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.

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.

Toxic shame is spiritual bankruptcy.

When we are not allowed to grieve, the energy is frozen. One of the rules of dysfunctional families is the no feel rule. This rule prohibited your inner child from even knowing what he was feeling. Another dysfunctional family rule is the no talk rule, which states that the expression of emotions is prohibited.

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

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

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.

With change history you use the potency of your adult experiences to change the internal imprints from the past.

We must risk reaching out and looking for nonshaming relationships if we are to heal our shame. There is no other way.

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

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.

If you didn't get your infancy needs met, if you were a Lost Child, you can give yourself a new infancy. You can do this by anchoring actual experiences relating to the strengths you have now.

Your addiction has been your false secure base—your primary relationship. You have to give up your false idol if you want to rejoin the human race. Healing your toxic shame demands that you surrender to your powerlessness over it.

Shame is the master emotion because it binds all the other emotions. Freely expressing our feelings is like thawing out. As shame binds all our feelings, we become psychologically numb.

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

Families are as sick as their toxic shame secrets.

There is almost always low-grade anger and depression in a dysfunctional family.

One of the things we know about grief resolution is that grief is one of the only problems in the world that will heal itself with support." (For a clear and concise discussion of unresolved grief read After the Tears by Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell.)

Mourning is the ultimate work of the externalization process. Mourning is the only way to heal our unmet developmental dependency needs. Since we cannot go back in time and be children and get our needs met from our very own parents, we must grieve the loss of our childhood self and our childhood dependency needs. Grief is a complex process that involves a range of human emotions.

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.

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.