To avoid the bad feelings, the child slowly learns to identify only with what he thinks of as “good” and to deny anything “bad” as part of who he is. He actually starts limiting his identity to only include what he has come to believe is “acceptable” in the eyes of his parents. Yet another child may despair altogether of getting any good strokes fr

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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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Clinical studies of such children reveal that a preponderance of them have parents who have related to them in either a helpless and fearful way or a hostile and self-referential one. The children of helpless and fearful parents, in particular, have a very difficult time later in life. Their parents tend to be sweet and fragile, not hostile or aggr

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