John Bradshaw Quotes

If you don't heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future.

Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result: Do it and the child heals.

My inner child is not wounded.

When I first went up to see my editor, I was with my agent, and my editor said, 'Well, what have you been doing all these years?' And my agent said, 'He's been in recovery. From his childhood.'

It all begins with forgiveness, because to heal the world, we first have to heal ourselves. And to heal the kids, we first have to heal the child within, each and every one of us.

I believe in any kind of personal growth practice that can help you gather the tools that you can then apply to resentment, anger, pain, and rage in order to heal your past resentments toward yourself and others, and then deal with them in the moment so you don't carry them for a decade or more.

There's a lot of wounded people out there who don't believe that there's any way they'll ever be healed from those wounds.

When we come to that compassionate awareness that is not afraid of the fear, that can embrace the fear, we are able to heal the wounds of the child and the adult and begin to live the lives we've always wanted to live.

I have a big hole in my heart," I said. "But it'll close over." I don't want to sound all Dr. Phil," she said. "But don't let the scab seal the pain in, okay?" That's good advice," I said. "I hope I can manage it.

According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.

Think of each wound as you would of a child who has been hurt by a friend. As long as that child is ranting and raving, trying to get back at the friend, one wound leads to another. But when the child can experience the consoling embrace of a parent, she or he can live through the pain, return to the friend, forgive, and build up a new relationship. Be gentle with yourself, and let your heart be your loving parent as you live your wounds through.

Your heart is not a wound to be poked at to see if the scab is ready to come off. You can be healed of that very old pain, if you’ll just let it happen. (Marianne)

I can heal the scars on your body, but I can’t heal the scars of the soul. Not yours, not mine. You have to learn to live with them. You have to choose to live beyond them

I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart

We cannot change past events, no matter how painful, but we can always intend how we 'feel' about them and heal ourselves.

Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.

The part of us that feels anger and depression is the same part that feels peace and love. If you refuse to feel the anger and the pain of a loss, you will not be able to feel anything else until that area heals. In other words, stay out of your own way. Let yourself feel bad if you want to feel bad. Feel joy, too. Healing is taking place. Give yourself the gift of healing.

Bullies generally were bullied and are hurting inside much more than you could ever imagine.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

Depression leads him close to his wounds, but only the mourning for what he has missed, missed at the crucial time, can lead to real healing.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

Everyone always says that love was enough. It wasn't. Not when your soul has been shattered.

A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain