Homecoming Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Jung said it well: “All our neuroses are substitutes for legitimate suffering.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

“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

“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

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

“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

“These authors posit that a value is not a value unless it has seven elements. They are: 1. It must be chosen. 2. There must be alternatives. 3. You must know the consequences of your choice. 4. Once chosen you prize and cherish it. 5. You are willing to publicly proclaim it. 6. You act on this value. 7. You act on it consistently and repeatedly.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

“We need to teach our inner child that problems are normal and that he must accept them.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

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

“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

“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

“Children are natural believers—they know there is something greater than themselves.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

“Their “strange Divinity” results from their lacking any sense of right or wrong, good or bad.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

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

“When children fail in school, it cause them great pain; they feel inferior, which creates a being wound: “I’m not okay.” If children do well in school, that too creates problems. Everything in life becomes a potential A; everything is centered around performance.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

“You cannot fail with detail.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

“Telling your story of violation to your support person is a way of reducing your toxic shame. Toxic shame, you’ll recall, creates isolation and fosters silence. The more ashamed a child is, the more he feels he has no right to depend on anyone. Because the wounded child never got his needs met and was shamed the most when he was the most needy, he may feel that he is bothering people if he asks them to listen to him. In truth, you have every right to let others love and nurture you.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child

“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

“What I now understand is that when a child's development is arrested, when feelings are repressed, especially the feelings of anger and hurt, a person grows up to be an adult with an angry, hurt child inside [them]. This child will spontaneously contaminate the person's adult behavior.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

“Tôi có quyền tin bất cứ điều gì tôi thấy tin. Tôi chỉ cần chấp nhận hẩu quả cho niềm tin của mình.”
― John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

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

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

“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