Home > Work > Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
21 " As addiction specialist Patrick Carnes has pointed out, 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
22 " The first developmental task in life is to establish a basic sense of trust. We must learn that the other (Mom, Dad, the world out there) is safe and trustworthy. "
23 " 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 "
24 " Teach your inner child to check things out. Give him permission to ask lots of questions. "
25 " When a child is deprived and neglected, he has a much harder time delaying gratification. Our wounded inner child believes that there is a severe scarcity of love, food, strokes, and enjoyment. Therefore, whenever the opportunity arises to have these things, our inner kid goes overboard. "
26 " He saw healthy shame as the guardian of our humanness. Shame, he posited, is the emotion that signals our human finitude, our human limits. Unhealthy shame results when we try to be more than human or when we act less than human. This insight was what I needed. "
27 " My group ridiculed and made fun of anyone who was not like us, and that comprised almost everyone! People with negative identity drop out and stand on the sidelines of life, making fun of everyone else. In actuality I was terrified of life. "
28 " Until this original pain is embraced and worked through, the person cannot recover from the effects of the violation. Without doing their original pain grieving, they cannot find and reclaim their wonder child. "
29 " charm and attraction, and it is the core of their innocence. Children live in the now and are oriented to pleasure. They accept life’s “queer conundrums, "
30 " Their “strange Divinity” results from their lacking any sense of right or wrong, good or bad. "
31 " 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. "
32 " When emotional energy blocks the resolution of trauma, the mind itself becomes diminished in its ability to function. "
33 " The spiritual wound can be healed. But it must be done by grieving, and that is painful. "
34 " The wounded inner child is filled with unresolved energy resulting from the sadness of childhood trauma. One of the reasons we have sadness is to complete painful events of the past, so that our energy can be available for the present. "
35 " many adults see play as idleness, and idleness as the proverbial “devil’s workshop. "
36 " One way adult children avoid their legitimate suffering is by staying in their heads. This involves obsessing about things, analyzing, discussing, reading, and spending lots of energy in trying to figure things out. There is a story about a room with two doors. Each door has a sign on it. One says HEAVEN; the other says LECTURE ON HEAVEN. "
37 " The most important skills he has to learn are those of socialization: cooperation, interdependence, and a healthy sense of competition. The preparation of one’s life work requires academic skills as well: reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, these skills should not have been more important than knowing, loving, and valuing oneself. In fact, a healthy sense of self-worth is essential for good learning. "
38 " We heal our toxic shame when we grasp that our “adult child” issues are about what happened to us, and not about who we really are! "
39 " My belief is that recovery from childhood abandonment, neglect, and abuse is a process, not an event. Reading this book and doing the exercises will not make all your problems disappear overnight. But I guarantee that you’ll discover a delightful little person within yourself. You will be able to listen to that child’s anger and sadness and to celebrate life with your inner child in a more joyous, creative, and playful way. "
40 " 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. "