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Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child QUOTES

Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child QUOTES

1 " a person who never learned to trust confuses intensity with intimacy, obsession with care, and control with security. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

2 " all misbehaving children are dis-couraged. Having lost heart, they believe they must manipulate in order to get their needs met. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

3 " 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. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

4 " When you learn how to re-parent yourself, you will stop attempting to complete the past by setting up others to be your parents. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

5 " 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. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

6 " Little girls are taught fairy tales that are filled with magic. Cinderella is taught to wait in the kitchen for a guy with the right shoe! Snow White is given the message that if she waits long enough, her prince will come. On a literal level, that story tells women that their destiny depends on waiting for a necrophile (someone who likes to kiss dead people) to stumble through the woods at the right time. Not a pretty picture! "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

7 " Jung said it well: “All our neuroses are substitutes for legitimate suffering. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

8 " Our schools and prisons are the only places in the world where time is more important than the job to be done. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

9 " Without our anger we become doormats and people pleasers. In childhood you were most likely severely shamed and punished when you expressed anger. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

10 " Kids from dysfunctional families cannot possibly seal their identity, because they have no sense of I AMness when they begin adolescence. My family was severely enmeshed as a result of my dad’s alcoholism and his physically abandoning us. Our enmeshment looked like this. As you can see, none of us had a whole distinct self. Most of each of us was part of the others. When one of us felt something, the others felt it too. If mom was sad, we all felt sad. If she was angry, we all felt it and tried to stop her from being angry. There was very little foundation for me to create my identity. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

11 " I could not heal my being with my doing. To be who I am is all that matters. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

12 " There is an absolutist quality to rage. Being angry all the time and overreacting to little things may be a sign that there is a deeper rage that needs to be worked on. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

13 " To a child, abandonment is death. In order to meet my two most basic survival needs (my parents are okay and I matter), I became Mom’s emotional husband and my younger brother’s parent. To help her and others made me feel that I was okay. I was told and believed that Dad loved me but was too sick to show it and that Mom was a saint. All of this covered up my sense of being worth-less than my parents’ time (toxic shame). My core material was composed of selected perceptions, repressed feelings, and false beliefs. This became the filter through which I interpreted all new experiences in my life. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

14 " Children are natural believers—they know there is something greater than themselves. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

15 " It is some bit of my father I keep not seeing. I cannot remember years of my childhood. Some parts of me I cannot find now.… Is there enough left of me now to be honest?… "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

16 " The latter quality, being one’s own locus of evaluation, means that one has a sense of satisfaction with himself. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

17 " see, hear, etc ………… (senses) I interpret …………… (mind, thinking) I feel …………… (emotions) I want …………… (desires) "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

18 " The very characteristics of childhood I am describing—wonder, dependency, curiosity, optimism—are crucial to the growth and flowering of human life. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

19 " 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. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

20 " When the inner child has been wounded through neglect of his developmental dependency needs, he either isolates and withdraws or clings and becomes enmeshed. "

― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child