John Bradshaw Quotes

It hurts when people put you down.

Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.

Alcoholics are amazed when I admit to them my addiction to work. Here I have a ground of real and not imagined empathy with them. Against the background of this, I have dubbed this addiction of myself and my fellow ministers as “workaholism.”

You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to popentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.

There is nothing to talk about" she said. "I'm just a freak that's all.

It's been said that alcoholics are egomaniacs with low self -esteem. It's the prefect description. Being larger than life and yet your pride is crushed with self- loathing.

Everybody's having fun, except me I'm the lonely one I live in shame.

I am not loved. I am not a beautiful soul. I am not a good-natured, giving person. I am not anybody's savior.

The idea that you're hard to love is ludicrous.

Wounded vanity knows when it is mortally hurt; and limps off the field, piteous, all disguises thrown away. But pride carries its banner to the last; and fast as it is driven from one field unfurls it in another, never admitting that there is a shade less honor in the second field than in the first, or in the third than in the second.

Almost without exception alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.

Making ourselves feel ugly is not fun." "We are ugly.

I had a very easy time loving an audience. But when it's one-on-one with somebody, all I wanted to do was run away, because maybe they're going to want something from me I can't give, or they're going to hurt me.

Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself. You imagine him being attracted to them. You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.

Cocaine was different. It kept saying, "You haven't had enough." I became an abuser almost instantly.

That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.

It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth.

How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.

The bottom line is, insults only hurt when they come from someone I respect.

I am deebly self-conscious, and bad.

Truth to tell, the longer I live, the more I'm tempted to think that the only moderately worthwhile people in the world are you and I.

It hurts like hell when the world won't invest in you. But it's excruciating, almost more than you can bear, when you don't believe and invest in yourself.

People who have addictive problems usually have some subset of emotional difficulties that causes them to abuse substances.

Would you hurt a man keenest strike at his self-love?

I feel crushingly embarrassed when I do bad work, so being rejected after doing bad work is actually harder than being rejected after doing good work.