Healing the Shame That Binds You

by John Bradshaw

The Inner Child journey is the hero’s journey. Becoming a fully functioning person is a heroic task. There are trials and tribulations along the way. In Greek mythology, Oedipus kills his father, and Orestes kills his mother. Leaving one’s parents are obstacles one must encounter on one’s hero’s journey. To kill our parents is a symbolic way to describe leaving home and growing up.

To find our Inner Child is the first leap over the abyss of grief that threatens us all. But finding the Inner Child is just the beginning. Because of his isolation, neglect and neediness, this child is egocentric, weak and frightened. He must be disciplined in order to release his tremendous spiritual power. You are the new nurturing parent who sets boundaries for the wounded child in you. As you heal your past wounds you will encounter your true self in the form of your free child. Your free child embodies all your neotenous traits. Integrating your childlike traits (spontaneity, joy, love, friendliness, curosity and fairness) is a necessary task toward your maturity.

Actually getting rid of the voices is extremely difficult because of the original rupturing of the interpersonal bridge and the resulting fantasy bond. As children are abandoned, and the more severely they are abandoned (neglected, abused, enmeshed), the more they create the illusion of connection with the parent. The illusion is what Robert Firestone calls the “fantasy bond.”

In order to create the fantasy bond the child has to idealize his parents and make himself “bad.” The purpose of fantasy bonding is survival. The child desperately relies on his parents. They can’t be bad. If they are bad or sick, he can’t survive. So the fantasy bond (which makes them good and the child bad) is like a mirage in the desert. It gives the child the illusion there is nourishment and support in his life.

As children in shame-based families we could not help but believe that we were bad and unlovable. We simply were not capable of grasping that our parents were shame-based, needy or in some cases downright emotionally ill.

In mind reading, you make assumptions (without evidence) about how people are reacting to you. “I can tell by their faces, they’re getting ready to fire me.” “She thinks I’m immature, or she wouldn’t ask me these questions.” These assumptions are usually born of intuition, hunches, vague misgivings, or one or two past experiences. Mind reading depends on projection. You imagine that people feel as bad about you as you do about yourself. As a shame-based person, you are critical and judgmental of yourself. You assume others feel the same way about you.

You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self. . . . Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never lose.

Intimacy requires the ability to be vulnerable. To be intimate is to risk exposing our inner selves to each other, to bare our deepest feelings, desires and thoughts. To be intimate is to be the very ones we are and to love and accept each other unconditionally. This requires self-confidence and courage. Such courage creates a new space in our relationship. That space is not yours or mine; it is ours.

Service and love for others flows directly from service and love for ourselves. We truly cannot give what we haven’t got.

Toxic shame, with its more-than-human/less-than-human grandiosity, is a problem involving the denial of human finitude. Being human requires courage. It requires courage because being human is being imperfect.