Some people who grew up in troubled or dysfunctional families found it difficult to complete a task or a project or to make decisions. This is because they did not practice doing so with the guidance...
Shame is the uncomfortable or painful feeling that we experience when we realize that a part of us is defective, bad, incomplete, rotten, phony, inadequate or a failure. In contrast to guilt, where we...
Rather happiness, peace or serenity is our natural state. Beneath all of what we add to our feelings and experience, beneath our self-contraction, lies serenity Itself. (pg. 141).
Guidance, also a part of helping the infant and child to develop and grow, may include advice, assistance, and any other form of help, verbal or non-verbal. It also includes modeling and teaching appr...
Because they have not healed their Child Within, they are generally unable to be a part of the safe and supportive healing of another. However, we can learn to set limits with these people, so that th...
1. Survival 2. Safety 3. Touching, skin contact 4. Attention 5. Mirroring and echoing 6. Guidance 7. Listening 8. Being real 9. Participating 10. Acceptance Others are aware of, take seriously and adm...
Spirituality is about the relationships that we have with our self, with others and with the universe. (pg. 127).
When we think or act this way, we do so at either one extreme or the other. For example, either we love someone completely or we hate them. There is no middle ground. We see the people around us as ei...
This is an amazing thing about infants. They can sense that mother is needy, and can eventually detect her specific needs and begin providing them for her. Of course, this carries a major price—the de...
The final need is unconditional love. This is a difficult concept for many to understand. I discuss this need further in Chapter 15.
Some have estimated that we show our True Self to others on average for only about 15 minutes each day. For whatever reasons, we tend to keep that part of us private. When we come from or when we are...
Separation, suffering and evil are the absence of realizing Love, and are therefore ultimately illusions. They are also manifestations of our searching for Love, Wholeness, and Home. The evil or darkn...
Disowning and neglecting our own needs is intimately related to being overly-responsible. Both are part of our false self’s actions. It may be useful at this point to review Chapter 4. Some may find i...
Awakening is the first glimpse that things or reality are not what we thought. Awakening is an ongoing process throughout recovery. To begin, we generally require an entry point or trigger—anything th...
Nearly all are associated with our relationship with ourself and with people around us. To reach our full potential, we apparently require most of these needs. Growing up in an environment without the...
In order to survive, the child who cannot develop a strong True Self compensates by developing an exaggerated false or co-dependent self.
In order to survive, the traumatized child’s Real Self (True Self or Child Within) goes into hiding deep within the unconscious part of its psyche. What emerges is a false self or ego which tries to r...
Paradoxically, we often feel like this false self is our natural state, the way we should be. This could be our addiction or attachment to being that way. We become so accustomed to being our false se...