Home > Work > Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
61 " but each has the same function: to keep the family system in balance, frozen and protected from the possibility of change. "
― John Bradshaw , Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child
62 " Nor do we believe that we will not matter if we don’t give care to others. "
63 " Children who are not loved in their very beingness do not know how to love themselves. As adults, they have to learn to nourish, to mother their own lost child. "
64 " we find people who are dependent on something outside of themselves in order to have an identity. These are examples of the dis-ease of co-dependence. "
65 " 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. "
66 " For example, a chronically depressed man who becomes a superachieving executive through his work addiction can feel only when he is working. An alcoholic or drug addict feels high with mood-altering drugs. A food addict feels a sense of fullness and well-being when his stomach is full. Each addiction allows the person to feel good feelings or to avoid painful ones. "
67 " Whenever a shame-based person feels his real feelings, he feels ashamed. So, to avoid that pain he numbs out. "
68 " As the child grows, lots of verbal encouragement needs to be added to stroking. This is a form of protection. Since children can’t live without strokes, they get them by hook or by crook. If they can’t get good strokes, they’ll go for bad ones. You will drink polluted water if there is no other water available. Your wounded inner child probably settled for lots of polluted water. That’s why the affirmations we used for each developmental stage are so important. You need to keep using them. They are the emotional strokes your child needs for nourishment. Go back now and look at the affirmations for each stage. Recall which affirmations were the most powerful for you. Use these for your special strokes. Your inner child needs to hear them every day when you are first learning to champion him. Mine are as follows: "
69 " Your inner child also needs to learn the difference between expressing a feeling and acting on a feeling. "
70 " In each case one parent is involved with his own dysfunction and the other is co-dependently addicted to him. The children are emotionally abandoned. To make matters worse, they become enmeshed in the covert or overt need to maintain the family’s precarious and unhealthy balance. In dysfunctional families, no one gets to be who he is. All are put in service to the needs of the system. "
71 " P’s”—potency, permission, and protection—are also the elements of healthy parenting. I like to add a fourth “P.” Championing is an ongoing process that involves corrective learning. "
72 " they dictate how each person is to behave and what he can and cannot feel. The most common role distortions of the preschool years are: Superresponsible One, Overachiever, Rebel, Underachiever, People Pleaser (nice guy/sweetheart), Caretaker, and Offender. This lack of individual identity is why dysfunctional families are dominated by toxic guilt. Healthy guilt is the guardian of conscience. It develops out of a healthy sense of shame; it is the moral dimension of healthy shame. The toddler’s shame is premoral and mostly preverbal. "
73 " It tells you that you are responsible for other people’s feelings and behavior; it may even tell you that your behavior made someone else sick, as when a father says, “Look what you kids have done, you’ve made your mother sick!” This results in your having a grandiose sense of responsibility. Toxic guilt is one of the most damaging ways your preschool inner child was wounded. "
74 " Adults who have a wounded inner child who failed to learn this lesson tend to be rigid and absolutist. They think in all-or-nothing extremes. "
75 " Where there had only been fearful emptiness … there is now unfolding a wealth of vitality. This is not a homecoming since this home had never before existed. It is the discovery of home. —ALICE MILLER "
76 " In divorcing salvation from achievement, the Christian had established the priority of being over doing. "
77 " Not knowing who you are is the greatest tragedy of all. The rigid family-system roles sealed during adolescence become the most conscious identity you have. In fact, these roles become addictions. By being in the role, you feel that you matter. To let go of the role would be to touch the deep reservoir of toxic shame that binds your original pain, the core of which is the spiritual wound. When you lost your I AMness, you lost your mattering. "
78 " One of the great advances of our generation has been the exposure of child abuse. We have come to see that our prevailing rules for raising children shame and violate their uniqueness and their dignity. Such rules have been a part of our emotional endarkenment. Alice Miller has shown with painful clarity how our current parenting rules have aimed at making the child fit the projected image of the parent. They have also enforced the idealization of parents by the wounded child. "