You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.
Children aren’t fooled. They know we give time to the things we love.
Shame is the root of all addictions.
Virtue is an inner strength. It expands your nature.
Healthy shame is an emotion that teaches us about our limits. Like all emotions, shame moves us to get our basic needs met.
Perhaps nothing so accurately characterizes dysfunctional families as denial.
The utter atrocities of Nazism have shown us clearly what the inherent potential of destruction in the parenting rules we have been using for the last 150 years. These rules are non-democratic. They are based on inequality of power and unequal rights. They promote the use and ownership of some people by others and teach the denial and repression of emotional vitality and spontaneity. They glorify obedience, orderliness, logic, rationality, power and male supremacy. They are flagrantly anti-life.
Sam Keen points out that Zen masters spend years to reach an enlightenment that every natural child already knows – the total incarnation of sleeping when you’re tired and eating when you’re hungry. What irony that this state of Zen-like bliss is programmatically and systematically destroyed.
Most people have a way to go in terms of developing intimacy and connecting skills when they get married or enter a long-term relationship. But the great thing about a committed relationship is that the relationship itself is a form of therapy. If both partners are committed, most of their differences can be worked out and even appreciated. Shame as the root feeling of humility allows each partner to appreciate and accept the other’s foibles and idiosyncrasies.
Our schools and prisons are the only places in the world where time is more important than the job to be done.
The wounded inner child contaminates intimacy in relationships because he has no sense of his authentic self. The greatest wound a child can receive is the rejection of his authentic self. When a parent cannot affirm his child’s feelings, needs, and desires, he rejects that child’s authentic self. Then, a false self must be set up.
When you learn how to re-parent yourself, you will stop attempting to complete the past by setting up others to be your parents.
The shared secret and the shared denial are the most horrible aspects of incest.
Playing roles and acting are forms of lying. If a person acts like they really feel and it rocks the boat, they are ostracized. We promote pretense and lying as a cultural way of life. Living this way causes an inner split. It teaches us to hide and cover up our toxic shame. This sends us deeper into isolation and loneliness.
Intimacy requires vulnerability and a lack of defensiveness. Intimacy requires healthy shame.
But when the feeling of shame is violated by a coercive and perfectionistic religion and culture – especially by shame-based source figures who mediate religion and culture – it becomes an all-embracing identity.
Healthy shame is the basic metaphysical boundary for human beings. It is the emotional energy that signals us that we are not God – that we will make mistakes, that we need help. Healthy shame gives us permission to be human.
Where are you, Adam? According to the book of Genesis, Adam went into hiding after the fall. By trying to be more than human, Adam felt less than human. Before the fall, Adam was not ashamed; after the fall he was. Toxic shame is true agony. It is a pain felt from the inside, in the core of our being. It is excruciatingly painful.
Darwin knew that the mother of the blush was shame. For Darwin, shame defines our essential humanity. Silvan Tomkins views shame as an innate feeling that limits our experience of interest, curiosity and pleasure.
PERFECTIONISM Perfectionism is a family system rule and a core culprit in creating toxic shame. We see it also in both the religious and cultural systems. Perfectionism denies healthy shame. It does so by assuming we can be perfect. Such an assumption denies our human finitude because it denies the fact that we are essentially limited. Perfectionism denies that we will often make mistakes.