Sarah

“Researchers have described shame as a feeling that is deeply associated with a person’s sense of self, apart from any interactions with others; guilt, on the other hand, emerges as a result of something I have done that negatively affects someone else. Guilt is something I feel because I have done something bad. Shame is something I feel because I am bad.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Left-brain mental processing disregards the right-brain emotional elements of trust that are necessary for life to thrive. When I know that I know something because I can logically prove it, I step away from trust. When I no longer trust, I am no longer open to being known, to relationship, to love.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“Our vulnerability, ultimately to potential abandonment (of which shame is the herald), is simultaneously both the source of all that is broken in our world as well as its redemption.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“But beyond this, and even more important, my problem is not just what I am sensing but that I do not feel adequate to respond to it. I perceive, beginning at nonconscious levels of awareness, that I do not have what it takes to tolerate what I feel. I am not just sad, angry or lonely. But ultimately these feelings rest on the bedrock that I am alone with what I feel, and no one is coming to my aid. Shame undergirds other affective states because of its relationship to being left. And to be abandoned ultimately is to be in hell. This terror of being alone drives my shame-based behavior and, ironically, takes me to the very place I most fear going—to the hell of absolute isolation.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves