Shame And Guilt Quotes

There are so many more productive things to do than sit around feeling shame and guilt. Beyond touching on shame and guilt in a perfunctory manner, I wouldn't bother with that at all. ~ Antony Hegarty

His desire was as deep and boundless as the sea, but when the tide receded, the rocks of shame and guilt thrust up as sharp as ever. Sometimes the waves would cover them, but they remained beneath the waters, hard and black and slimy. ~ George R R Martin

All it takes for us to be guilty of theft is one misspent hour at work; one item we "forgot" to return from the office; one personal long-distance phone call we made at the company's expense; one overpriced item in our store. We see our sinless Lord, crucified for thieves not unlike the one hanging next to Him. Here was one person who never took what did not belong to Him, and who fulfilled all His obligations and paid debts He did not owe, and yet He hangs here next to a common thief, bearing His shame and guilt before God as though He had committed the crime. The thief crucified next to our Lord may have experienced the wrath of Rome that dark Friday afternoon, but because of the crucifixion of a Man just feet from him, he would not have to endure the wrath of heaven. All thieves who trust in Christ can expect to hear those same words on their death-bed from the spotless Lamb: "Today you shall be with me in Paradise. ~ Michael S. Horton

Murderers with severe personality disorders, police had learned, sometimes could fool a lie detector because they lacked shame and guilt, and didn't feel the normal stress when lying. ~ Michael Benson

Never feel guilty about anything shame and guilt are a waste of time just do what you do
and deal with it ~ Kevin Brooks

We live in a society where we're not taught how to deal with our weaknesses and frailties as human beings. We're not taught how to speak to our difficulties and challenges. We're taught the Pythagorean theorem and chemistry and biology and history. We're not taught anger management. We're not taught dissolution of fear and how to process shame and guilt. I've never in my life ever used the Pythagorean theorem! ~ Iyanla Vanzant

Shelley, you're just like that oyster." God confronted me on the deeper areas of my life that I wouldn't let Him open up and heal. When Garrett saw me walk off alone over the sandy hills, he knew God was leading me to a healing moment. Standing on the edge of the salty waters of Puget Sound, I allowed God to reach into the darkest places in my heart and expose the ugly lies I believed about myself. Huge salty tears pouring out like waves, God assured me He threw my sins out as far as the east is from the west. The tremendous shame and guilt I carried for so many years was being literally washed away into the Pacific Ocean. I was no longer a broken child of sexual abuse but a cherished Champion daughter of the Most High God. ~ Shelley Lubben

Guilt and shame are both emotions of self-evaluation; however, that is where the similarities end. The majority of shame researchers agree that the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the differences between "I am bad" (shame) and "I did something bad" (guilt). Shame is about who we are and guilt is about our behaviors. If I feel guilty for cheating on a test, my self-talk might sound something like "I should not have done that. That was really stupid. Cheating is not something I believe in or want to do." If I feel shame about cheating on a test, my self-talk is more likely to sound like "I'm a liar and a cheat. I'm so stupid. I'm a bad person. ~ Brene Brown

Work on psychological blocks like shame and guilt - they falsely color your reality. ~ Deepak Chopra

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. ~ Jonathan Swift

We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

Your mistakes are to help you develop your purpose, not shame and guilt. ~ Sue Fitzmaurice

Despite their differences, pride, shame, and guilt all activate similar neural circuits, including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and the nucleus accumbens. Interestingly, pride is the most powerful of these emotions at triggering activity in these regions - except in the nucleus accumbens, where guilt and shame win out. This explains why it can be so appealing to heap guilt and shame on ourselves - they're activating the brain's reward center. ~ David D. Burns

If you don't enjoy your life, sorrow, sadness, suffering, fear, shame and guilt will. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation. ~ Henry Fielding

It is sadly true that most institutions and nations admire and reward sins of the "spirit," and various forms of arrogance and greed often lead to promotions and praise. But pride, ambition, and vanity are still pride, ambition, and vanity; they do not stop being capital sins because someone is pope or president. "Greed is good" in America, extravagant bonuses are envied and imitated, and careerism is rampant among the clergy ... Sins of the flesh, however, carry shame and guilt and can always be used to bring anybody down in church, culture, or the state. ~ Richard Rohr

If I were your enemy, I'd constantly remind you of your past mistakes and poor choices. I'd want to keep you burdened by shame and guilt, in hopes that you'll feel incapacitated by your many failings and see no point in even trying again. I'd work to convince you that you've had your chance and blown it - that your God may be able to forgive some people for some things, but not you . . . not for this. ~ Priscilla Shirer

What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose? ~ Bernhard Schlink

The distinction between shame and guilt is very important, since these two emotions may tear a person in opposite directions. The wish to relieve guilt may motivate a confession, but the wish to avoid the humiliation of shame may prevent it. ~ Paul Ekman

The illusion was created by (mortals), and now they believe in it too strongly. They use their power to create a drama of birth and death, joy and pain ... In truth, the darkness has no power other than what they give it ... (T)he secret of conquering evil (is) YOU ARE EVIL. When you can face that, all monsters dissolve into the mist ... All monsters live in a dark place where mortals stuff their fears and shame and guilt. ~ Deepak Chopra

Every word I put down, I put down with tears, with bitter blood, with sour gall, well mixed and blended with shame and guilt. ~ V.C. Andrews

Glory, built on selfish principles, is shame and guilt. ~ William Cowper

(...) psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes, or to operate death camps. Perhaps if we were raised without shame and guilt about our desires, we might be freer people in more ways than simply the sexual. ~ Dossie Easton

So let us recognise our shame and guilt; let us ache with self-reflection; let us eradicate the repetition of suffering and resist anger; let us learn to concretely tend to the suffering of an individual, of our common citizens, with equality; let us learn to live life with honour and dignity and a wealth of humanity. ~ Xiaobo Liu

The past plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before my parents' funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all the Saleems go pouring out of me, from the baby who appeared in jumbo-sized front-page baby-snaps to the eighteen-year-old with his filthy dirty love, pouring out goes shame and guilt and wanting-to-please and needing-to-be-loved and determined-to-find-a-historical-role and growing-too-fast, I am free ~ Salman Rushdie

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and the other who is witness to the stigma. Stigmatization is a much more powerful elicitor of shame and guilt in that it requires a negotiation not only between one's self and one's attributions, but between one's self and the attributions of others. ~ Michael Lewis

Last time I'd made a trek to Zane's hotel room, we'd been at NerdCon, and I'd been fueled by pride and anger and desire. Now, all I felt was shame and guilt. And love. In ~ Megan Erickson

Nothing more unqualified the man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt. ~ Jonathan Swift

IS THERE A DIFFERENCE between shame and guilt?" Anna asked. "Shame is psychic extortion," Doktor Messerli answered. "Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise. ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

I was just lying there, swimming in my own shame and guilt, when this still small voice whispered into the depths of my soul: I love you. I desire you. I delight in you. I saw you were going to that before I went to the cross, and I still went. ~ Jefferson Bethke

Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society, and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential. ~ Willard Gaylin

So often we are inclined to keep our lives hidden. Shame and guilt prevent us from letting others know what we are living. We think: 'If my family and friends knew the dark cravings of my heart and my strange mental wanderings, they would push me away and exclude me from their company.' But the opposite is true. When we dare to lift our cup and let our friends know what is in it, they will be encouraged to lift their cups and share with us their own anxiously hidden secrets. The greatest healing often takes place when we no longer feel isolated by our shame and guilt and discover that others often feel what we feel and think what we think and have the fears, apprehensions, and preoccupations we have."
Henri Nouwen, Can You Drink the Cup ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

We can learn personal humility from episodes that generate shame and guilt. After retiring from worldly affairs and drawing useful lessons from personal disgrace, we must resume living an expedient life devoted to appreciating truth, beauty, and love. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When breeders are sluts for enjoying the act, and in pain, while the males are made heroic for all such conquests, we achieve detente in the war between the genders. Confuse, conquer, and control, my son. This rape culture, coupled with the holy trinity of blame, shame and guilt, makes for a yeasty culture of manipulation. ~ Nicole Quinn

The whole crazy business seemed to pull out of my guts the very worst in me - my worst fears - the worst aspects of my character - my worst insecurities and feelings of shame and guilt. I didn't know it at the time, but that was exactly what was supposed to be happening. That's what Solomonic magick is all about. The worst in me was my problem. The worst in me was the demon. When it finally dawned on me that I had successfully evoked the demon, and I had the worst of me trapped in that magick Triangle, I had no alternative but to harness and redirect its monstrous power and give it new marching orders. From then on, that particular demon would be working for me rather than against me. ~ Lon Milo DuQuette

The best way to coerce people is through guilt and fear. It's why religion's done such smashing business for thousands of years. ~ Niels Saunders

If we divide human attributes into "masculine" and "feminine" and strengthen only those attributes that "belong" to that sex, we cut off half of ourselves from ourselves as human beings, condemned forever to search for our other half. The world is in desperate need of multilayered human beings with the voices, stamina, and insight to break through our current calcified ways of doing things, (...) The patriarchal structures of honor, shame, violence, and might is right, do as much harm to Hamlet, Edgar, Lear, and Coriolanus as they do to Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macduff (...)
(...) To have feelings, intuitive flights of understanding, a desire to have knowledge of what is happening below the surface, to serve. These are often called "feminine" attributes, and it is true that many women in the plays possess them. But they also belong to Kent, Ferdinand, Florizel, Camillo, as well as the women. So they are not "feminine" attributes: they are human attributes. ~ Tina Packer

I've made a terrible confession to you," he concluded gloomily. "Do appreciate it, gentlemen. And it's not enough, not enough to appreciate it, you must not just appreciate it, it should also be precious to you, and if not, if this, too, goes past your souls, then it means you really do not respect me, gentlemen. I tell you that, and I will die of shame at having confessed to such men as you. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done ... one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs. ~ Elie Wiesel

Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh. ~ Edward Gibbon

Father of the fatherless son, you are your son's missing hero. Let it be known, you do not have the right to take offense when another man steps in and raises your son. If you are alive and well, it is a shame that another man has to step up to the plate to raise your son to be a better man than you. However, it is a lovely thing for your son, because blood doesn't always run deep. Love runs deep and love conquers all hearts, bodies, and souls. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Wasted tries, The many whys, Is it the soul of Compromise?
Lows and highs, Believing in lies, In life we have to improvise.
Frustration and cries, The last leg of sighs, You are the dreamer in disguise!
To the guilt say goodbyes, Open your eyes, Your soul - I do so recognize. ~ Julieanne O'Connor

When difficulties confront him he no longer blames them upon the inscrutable enmity of remote and ineffable powers; he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And when he sets out to remedy that ignorance and to remove that incompetence he does not look to any such powers for light and leading; he puts his whole trust in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Not infrequently he overestimates his capacities and comes to grief, but his failures, at worst, are much fewer than the failures of his fathers. Does pestilence, on occasion, still baffle his medicine? Then it is surely less often than the pestilences of old baffled sacrifice and prayer. Does war remain to shame him before the bees, and wasteful and witless government to make him blush when he contemplates the ants? Then war at its most furious is still less cruel than Hell, and the harshest statutes ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the irrational and appalling jurisprudence of the Christian God.

Today every such man knows that the laws which prevail in the universe, whatever their origin in some remote and incomprehensible First Purpose, manifest themselves in complete impersonality, and that no representation to any superhuman Power, however imagined, can change their operation in the slightest. He knows that when they seem arbitrary and irrational it is not because omnipotent and inscrutable Presences are playing with them, as a child might play with building blocks ~ H.L. Mencken

Working in the arts, you see people who come from terrible circumstances and who, for whatever reason, have incredible talent. But of course, with that great talent comes some guilt because, if you come from circumstances that don't encourage it, it can be really confusing. ~ Jesse Eisenberg

Women trapped in violent relationships need to know that there's no shame in talking out and walking out on their abusive partners. ~ Kate Thornton

He might despise her, but the woman whom he had once loved should be kept from shame; and ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Maybe, mija, you're the one not deserving of him, and that, mi princesa, is a heartbreaking shame because I thought we raised you better than that. ~ M.L. Rodriguez

Evidently, if support and care are devoted to an abused child at an early level of the occurrences, the long-lasting outcomes may be less cruel. ~ Patricia Dsouza

The first draught serveth for health, the second for pleasure, the third for shame, and the fourth for madness. ~ Anacharsis

June 16th NO SHAME IN NEEDING HELP "Don't be ashamed of needing help. You have a duty to fulfill just like a soldier on the wall of battle. So what if you are injured and can't climb up without another soldier's help?" - MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.7 No one ever said you were born with all the tools you'd need to solve every problem you'd face in life. In fact, as a newborn you were practically helpless. Someone helped you then, and you came to understand that you could ask for that help. It was how you knew you were loved. Well, you are still loved. You can ask anyone for help. You don't have to face everything on your own. If you need help, comrade, just ask. ~ Ryan Holiday

The thing about your past ... it never stays there. We just think it does until the time comes for it to reveal itself in all its gory shame. And there's nothing, absolutely nothing a person can do, but watch ~ Rachel Van Dyken

But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil
that is moral guilt. ~ Karl Jaspers

He pointed to the money, and said:
The love of it is the root of all evil. There it lies, the ancient tempter, newly red with the shame of its latest victory
the dishonor of a priest of God and his two poor juvenile helpers in crime. If it could but speak, let us hope that it would be constrained to confess that of all its conquests this was the basest and the most pathetic. ~ Mark Twain

Hamlet | Act I, Scene III

POLONIUS:
Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There, my blessing with thee.
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous, chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee! ~ William Shakespeare

Shame is a fitter and generally a more effectual punishment for a child than beating. ~ Samuel Richardson

STAY AN ORIGINAL WORK OF ART

In this short lifetime,
Why not be --
True to your own voice,
Your own story,
Your own truths,
Your own style,
Beat and drum --
Instead of reflect the words,
Songs and march of another?
Why not use your soul's own
Unique language,
Instead of constantly try to toot something
Not true, suitable or intended
For your own instrument,
Painting,
Song,
Or story?

Why create an image you cannot produce?
And if you can create a brilliant mask,
How long will you really be able to hide your true soul
Behind it
Until its colors and plastic
Begin to fade and melt with
Time?

Do not speak about truth when there is no truth in you.
Do not speak about being yourself when you are trying hard to be someone else.
Do not keep crying about your pain when you you have no shame creating pain in others.
Do not step on truth, or someone else's truth, or someone who fights for truth --
And think there will be no repercussions;
For there is more danger in silence,
And for every action there will always be a reaction
Of opposite or equal measure.

Treasure integrity,
Treasure your own story and truths.
How will people remember you when you want to be an imitation?
How will people remember your voice when you want to sound like another?
Be so different that everybody will re ~ Suzy Kassem

The world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone. ~ Donna Tartt

Yes. This. It was just what she needed, because here, held by him like this, her guilt, her regret, her fears ... all of it gave way to this heady, languid sensation of being desired and she didn't want it to stop.
Any of it. ~ Jill Shalvis

Soeur Marie Emelie"

Soeur Marie Emelie
is little and very old:
her eyes are onyx,
and her cheeks vermilion,
her apron wide and kind
and cobalt blue.

She comforts
generations and generations
of children,
who are
"new"
at the convent school.
When they are eight,
they are already up to her shoulder,
they grow up and go into the world,
she remains,
forever,
always incredibly old,
but incredibly never older...
She has an affinity with the hens,
When a hen dies,she sits down on a bench and cries,
she is the only grown-up, whose tears
are not frightening tears.
Children can weep without shame,
at her side...
Soeur Marie Emelie...
her apron as wide and kind
as skies on a summer day
and as clean and blue. ~ Caryll Houselander

Understand now that everything was done so that the Germans would never see us; or, if they saw us, would not have to admit it; or, if they had to admit it, would be able to say that we looked fine and would never be irritated by a sense of guilt or pricked by a moment of compassion. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

What happens now is that if some unfortunate man goes to bed with some woman, overnight there's a divorce. He thinks and feels about the authenticity of his being, then they have to get married. So they just end up having serial marriages, which is distressing for the children. It would be much better if people just put up with the guilt of having erred and shut up. ~ Fay Weldon

One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Because He freely owned my guilt I may freely own my sin. Guilty as charged, and yet, not guilty at all. ~ R.C. Sproul Jr.

But if pressed, I'd have to say that what I love most about the subways of New York is what they do not do. One may spend a lifetime looking back - whether regretfully or wistfully, with shame or fondness or sorrow - and thinking how, given the chance, things might have been done differently. But when you enter a subway car and the doors close, you have no choice but to give yourself over to where it is headed. The subway only goes one way: forward. ~ Bill Hayes

There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity i am bought and sold; for them i will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; - though i confess with shame i sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by i shall have the manhood to withhold. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prayer gives us strength for great ideals, for keeping up our faith, charity, purity, generosity; prayer gives us strength to rise up from indifference and guilt, if we have had the misfortune to give in to temptation and weakness. Prayer gives us light by which to see and to judge from God's perspective and from eternity. That is why you must not give up on praying! ~ Pope John Paul II

The world around us sends us messages about ourselves as women - about our guilt, and our difference, our accountability and our flaws. It gives us endless reminders of the vulnerability and victimization of women. It lets us know that it is normal and common for women to experience assault and harassment and rape. And it tells us that we deserve it. And all the while we are conditioned to be passive and pleasant, not to make a fuss - to be ladylike and compliant and socially acceptable. Before we experience violence we are conditioned to expect it - and to accept it. ~ Laura Bates

But If I'd learned anything over the last year and a half, it was the reality of how tough it was to live with your mistakes. I'd learned how hard it was to face them, and how much harder it was to own them. We all did things we regretted; we all said things we regretted, and guilt was a crushing weight on a person's soul.
And I wanted to be better. For me. Not for anyone else. ~ Marina Zapata; From Lukov With Love

If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it ... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself. ~ Ernest Becker

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,
made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. ~ Oscar Wilde

The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits ... One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to 'try,' but to do. ~ Mary Hunter Austin

Lydia had been fantasizing about him to the point she nearly drove him insane with it. It had taken four days for his energy to weaken inside her enough that he could go and visit her without fear she would throw him across the town in a gust of wind, and thus cause a scene. Although, getting run out of town after one day would be a new MacGregor record. ~ Michelle M. Pillow

Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame
I'd make a really cute animated creature. ~ Kate Bornstein

Guilt is like a sore, endlessly fascinating, and the guilty party feels compelled to examine it and pick at it, so that it never really heals. ~ Stephen King

Kentbridge's guilt stemmed from the fact he'd reluctantly agreed to enter his orphans into the MK-Ultra program – and while they were still very young. Naylor had convinced him at the time Omega needed a way to control its orphans if any of them ever rebelled. ~ James Morcan

The feeling of guilt is planted in a person not when life is first breathed into him because this is the moment when all is possible, but rather when he is conscious of having done something wrong and his action has a negative effect on someone. ~ Stanka Gjurić

Sadness is melancholy. Depression is a black hole of despair. I always imagine it's like drowning. There are short bursts of fresh air, like Alice, but the past, the hopelessness, the guilt, and self-loathing is a pair of lead shoes that always pull me back under. ~ Kim Holden

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag
it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Here is the kind of thought pattern that runs through the mind of the child in the alcoholic family system: "If I feel guilty, then I am responsible. And if I am responsible, then I can do something to fix it, to change it, to make it different." Giving up your guilt also means giving up your sense that you have control over the situation. And, of course, loss of control is a disaster. You have grown up to be the perfect doormat for an inconsiderate person. Often you end up in a perfect give-and-take relationship . . . you give, they take. ~ Janet Geringer Woititz