When we are exposed without any way to protect ourselves, we feel the pain of shame. If we are continually overexposed, shame becomes toxic.

“We must beware of thinking of Good and Evil as absolute opposites,” writes Carl Jung. Good and evil are potentials in every human being; they are halves of a paradoxical whole. Each represents a judgment, and “we cannot believe that we will always judge rightly.”

It is a healthy human feeling that can become a true sickness of the soul.

Shame begets shame.

Total self-love and acceptance is the only foundation for happiness and the love of others. Without total self-love and acceptance, we are doomed to the enervating task of creating false selves.

My general working definition of compulsive/addictive behavior is “a pathological relationship to any mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences.”

In a family, the whole family as an organism is greater than any individual in the family. The family is defined by the relationship between the parts, rather than the sum of the parts. As social systems, families have components, rules, roles and needs that define the system.

Spirituality is about love, truth, goodness, beauty, giving and caring. Spirituality is about wholeness and completion. Spirituality is our ultimate human need. It pushes us to transcend ourselves and become grounded in the ultimate source of reality.

The mystery of evil has not been dismissed by the demythologizing of the Devil. Rather, it has been intensified in the twentieth century by two world wars, Nazism, Stalinism, the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the heinous and ruthless extermination of Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhism by Pol Pot. These reigns of evil form what has