Healing the Shame That Binds You

In addition to hopelessness, another primary indicator of an image is a pervasive sense of shame, a feeling of not being worthy or deserving. A specific shame lives in the inner child of all of us, stemming from the time we discovered, with a great shock, that our parents and our world were not perfect. The child has a great need to believe that he

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I am convinced that some people are driven to addictions to quiet their constant inner critic, but it only gives them another thing to hate about themselves. What a vicious cycle! Moral scrutiny is not to discover how good or bad we are and regain some moral high ground, but to begin some honest “shadowboxing” which is at the heart of all spiritual... See more

Shame is when you feel like you will never have a place where you are accepted and can feel at home. We have an image we want to project (the first voice) because this internal narrative of shame (the second voice) is driving us. The image we want to project by proving or hiding isn’t who we really are. The driving narration of shame isn’t who we a

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I don’t how shame came to be part of the equation of who I am—but it ran pretty deep. I think that sense of inner shame is pretty common among us alcoholics and addicts; it’s true that drinking and using let us escape other people and external obligations—but it was mostly me that I was running from.