Shame Quotes

The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love. --Hubert H. Humphrey

Shame Quotes To Help You Begin Healing From Shame

Hi everybody, here are some shame quotes to help you understand your feelings of shame after child abuse.

Shame occurs when you haven't been able to get away with the 'who' you want people to think you are.

--Carl Whitaker

Shame is pride's cloak.

--William Blake

Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.

--François de La Rochefoucauld

Shame-based clients require the kind of security-giving relationship that has been lacking in their lives.

--Gershan Kaufman

You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly centrl and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self…Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never lose.

--Jo Courdet

The shame that arises from praise which we do not deserve often makes us do things we should otherwise never have attempted.

--Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Share whatever it is you're ashamed about. You may think you can hide your shame by not talking about it, but in reality, it's your shame that's hiding you.

--Adam Appleson

Doubt is the brother of shame.

--Anonymous

She learned to her dismay that she only felt loved when she wasn't being herself.

--Joel Covitz

Children will invest as much energy as needed to ensure the preservation of family harmony, even if it means sacrificing themselves to do so by developing psychological disorders.

--Joel Covitz

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed.

--Frederick Nietzsche

Where shame is, there is also fear.

--John Milton

Exposure to oneself lies at the heart of shame. We discover in experiences of shame the most sensitive, intimate and vulnerable parts of ourself.

--Anonymous

I used to plan my life and now I just show up.

--Anonymous

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

--Milan Kundera

False shame only is harmful.

--Titus Livy

What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid.

--Robin G. Collingwood

As a child grows in an environment in which his needs and longings for specialness and warm relatedness are consistently frustrated, he begins to turn away from his own needs in depression and shame. We can imagine the young child wondering, "What is wrong with me that I get so little response from my mother? The two possible answers are I am too defective and unworthy of love, and there is something wrong with what I am asking for." In both cases, there is something wrong, either with the child himself or with his needs and desires. This experience of unimportance or wrongness is the common relational backdrop for vulnerability and susceptibility to shame.

--Andrew P. Morrison, The Culture of Shame (Northvale, New Jersey:Jason Aronson,Inc. 1998), 66

Your shame hides in many places - in anger, blame, denial, workaholism, perfectionism, drinking, and anything else you compulsively engage in to make yourself feel better. But if you could just learn to be vulnerable for one second, and open up to the pain, you would find there's no place left for your shame to hide.

--Adam Appleson

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

--George Bernard Shaw

I hope these shame quotations helped you deal with your feelings of shame. ~Adam

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