Abnormal Child Quotes

One day I dream that we can grow in a matured society where nobody would be 'normal or abnormal' but just human beings, accepting any other human being -- ready to grow together.

I don’t want to be labeled mentally ill or handicapped. I’m a child of God, not a disorder. I have a tick, a quirk, which makes my brain act abnormally, but it’s still beautifully designed.

I see everything as if in a dark mirror, as if through smoked glass. I view the world in the same way as others look at the Sun in eclipse. Thus I see the Earth in eclipse. I see us moving about blindly in eternal Gloom, like the May bugs trapped in a box by a cruel child. It's easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence. I interpret everything as abnormal, terrible and threatening. I see nothing but Catastrophes. But as the Fall is the beginning, can we possibly fall even lower?

For, as I have suggested, disruption of the unity of the self is not limited to the cases that come to physicians and institutions for treatment. They accompany every disturbance of normal relations of husband and wife, parent and child, group and group, class and class, nation and nation. Emotional responses are so total as compared with the partial nature of intellectual responses, of ideas and abstract conceptions, that their consequences are more pervasive and enduring. I can, accordingly, think of nothing of greater practical importance than the psychic effects of human relationships, normal and abnormal, should be the object of continues study, including among the consequences the indirect somatic effects.” – The unity of the human being

He was not a monster, she said. People say he was a monster, but he was not one. What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation. A big child, she would have said to herself. Her heart would have melted, she'd have smoothed the hair back from his forehead, kissed him on the ear, and not just to et something out of him either. The instinct to soothe, to make it better. There there, she'd say as he awoke from a nightmare. Things are so hard for you. All this she believed, because otherwise how could she keep on living? She was very ordinary, under that beauty.

Rikki looked over at me. “Why now?" she asked, looking back at Arly. “Why is this happening now?" "Hard to say." Arly [therapist] replied. "DID usually gets diagnosed in adulthood. Something happens that triggers the alters to come out. When Cam's father died and he came in to help his brother run the family business he was in close contact with his mother again. Maybe it was seeing Kyle around the same age when some of the abuse happened. Cam was sick for a long time and finally got better. Maybe he wasn't strong enough until now to handle this. It's probably a combination of things. But it sure looks like some of the abuse Cam experienced involved his mother. And sexual abuse by the mother is considered to he one of the most traumatic forms of abuse. In some ways it's the ultimate betrayal.

The entire universe has been harmoniously created and everything in it work in harmony.The sun has its rising and settling time. Seasonal changes have their own time for appearing and departing.Fruit bearing trees have their own time and timing. The child crawls and then walks.We take a step to make a journey. A simple deviation then from the normal is a simple deviation to the abnormal.

Such experiences can act even on the unborn child. A recent study found that, at one year of age, the infants of women traumatized during their pregnancies by the 9/11 tragedy had abnormal blood levels of the stress hormone, cortisol.2 According to numerous human and animal studies, adverse early experiences may lead to permanent imbalances of essential brain chemicals that modulate mood and behavior.

Some parents resist the idea of ADD for fear of seeing their children labeled and categorized. They do not like the idea of pinning a medical diagnosis on a child who, except in certain areas of functioning, seems quite well. Such fears are not baseless. Too often ADD seems no more than a judgment that characterizes a child as a problem student, incapable of normal activity. How people use language is quite revealing. People commonly say that this adult or that child “is ADD.” That, indeed, is labeling, identifying the whole person with an area of weakness or impairment. No one is ADD, and no one should be defined or categorized in terms of it or any other particular problem. Recognizing a child’s ADD should be simply a way of understanding that helping him calls for some knowledgeable and creative approaches, not a judgment that there is anything fundamentally or irretrievably wrong with him. This recognition should enable us to support the child in fullfilling his potential, not to further limit him. That even open-minded people may have difficulty coming to terms with this diagnosis is only to be expected. Our usual mode of thinking about illness (or anything else, for that matter) is not comfortable with ambiguity. A patient either has pneumonia or does not; she either has some illness affecting the mind or does not. There is a popular discomfort with any condition of the mind perceived as “abnormal.” But what if illness is not a separate category, if there is no line of distinction between the “healthy” and the “nonheaithy,” if the “abnormality” is just a greater concentration in an individual of disturbed brain processes found in everyone? Then perhaps there are no fixed, immutable brain disorders, and we could all be vulnerable to mental breakdowns or malfunctions under the pressure of stressful circumstances. We could all go crazy. Maybe we already have.

You’re exhausted. Plain and simple.” She scribbled on her prescription pad. “According to that book you’re holding, the death gene is passed from mother to child in the birth canal. Something about microdermabrasions and infectious vaginal rash. Does your mother exhibit any signs of hormonal abnormalities?” “I don’t think so.” “You might want to ask her. If you are a carrier, I can suggest something for you. An herbal lotion. Only if you want it. I’d have to order it special from Peru.” “I was born caesarian, in case that’s a factor.” “The noble method,” she said. “Ask her anyway.

Angela was being reassuring. Someone must have been getting at the child. Wouldn’t you think they’d be delighted to see someone try to get on? Give some encouragement and support. But it had never been the way. “I do worry a bit. I don’t want to be abnormal.” Clare was solemn. “Well, I hope you’re not bigheaded enough to think that you’re something special. That would be a sin of Pride you know.” “I suppose so.” “You can know it, not suppose it. It’s there in black and white in the catechism. The two great sins against Hope are Pride and Despair. You mustn’t get drawn toward either of them.

Stupendous carnage was painted on the canvas, A depiction of repulsion was executed around the structure. It revealed its dark emblem by painting its sinister Red. Three intertwined bloated eyes are encrusted together, awfully deformed - the horrendous stench of decay can be smelt from it, for it exudes a sulfurous aroma of rotting animals. A torn torso of a butchered rabbit laid on the eye sockets, with all its arms, legs, and head severed off. A sludge-like, bubbling, dripping fluid oozed from the abnormally large eyes, leaving the ground deserted to rust and becoming the midst of a terrible famine. Blood Gushes from the slashes of each hideous eye, gouging out gore from the torn skin, spluttering and erupting gasping cries as it struggles in its own twisted misery of giving birth, as it was preparing to give shape-shifting life to a black-glass body, horn-like entity, unlike any childbirth you have ever witnessed. Satanic was this creature, whose muscle mass was disintegrated. All of his blood was squeezed out, forlorn and cold to the touch. The thorns on his head were intertwined into horns. A serpent's nose and wolf-like fangs were all this child had, as he had no gift of sight or hearing, he had only the smell of terror as his power.

Total neglect of women in pregnancy and childbirth had been the norm. Among many primitive societies, women menstruating or with child, or in labour or suckling the child, were regarded as unclean, polluted. The woman was isolated and frequently could not be touched, even by another woman. She had to go through the whole ordeal alone. Consequently only the fittest survived, and by the processes of mutation and adaptation, inherited abnormalities, such as disproportion in the size of the pelvis and the foetal head, died out of the race, particularly in remote parts of the world, and labour became easier. In Western society, which we call civilisation, this did not occur, and a dozen or more complications, some of them deadly, were superimposed on the natural hazards: overcrowding, staphylococcal and streptococcal infection; infectious diseases such as cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid and tuberculosis; venereal disease; rickets; multiple and frequent childbirth; the dangers from infected water. If you add to all this the attitude of indifference and neglect that often surrounded childbirth it is not hard to understand how childbirth came to be known as “the curse of Eve”, and how women could often expect to die in order to bring forth new life.

Youth. Murder (Biko). Slavery. Freedom. We are all creatures of ignorance at the end of the day. The natural order of the hierarchy of life states that we are creatures. Creatures of habit whether it is normal (following the status quo and all of that jazz). Creatures of marching orders and almost sanitary routine. Creatures of the abnormal. Our leaders are coldly obliterating the past. It is impossible to destroy nations, tribes, individuals without their permission. Many lessons learned from the past come to life like the connect the dots game of a child in a museum. We are swift to forget history. Bury the past like yesterday’s newspaper, our infirm and elderly in nursing homes.

The concept of “original sin” has been distorted by clergy and laity alike to mean that people are “born bad,” a condition that children accept when they incorporate their parents’ negative feelings toward them. This “bad” image of the self leads the individual to seek atonement through self-denial. “Original sin” has been interpreted to mean that the naked body is somehow sinful and dirty. This mistaken notion supports feelings of shame that originate in the child’s earliest experiences of the family. In traditional families, most children grow up with considerable guilt about their bodies and their bodily functions. Abnormal guilt reactions introjected by the child from defended parents lead to serious limitations in adult relationships.

So, let’s reorient from exterior to interior. “Distraction” then becomes boredom; “impulsiveness” becomes self-generated explorative behavior based on what captures interest; “abnormal activity level” is thus high-energy levels generating multiple task interests; “disorganization” is failure to follow rigid organizational regimens set by others; “anxiety”—well, we all know that one: what the hell kind of world did I get born into?; “emotional lability” is, in fact, a wide range of emotions that are accessed when adults or the exterior culture don’t want them to be. In other words, should you have ever read Mark Twain, what is being described is “Tom Sawyer syndrome,” a once common state of being in many if not most children. The more widely open the sensory gating channels are, the more the child’s behavior alters from what is currently held to be the cultural norm in the West. On average, some

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

You were taught that even when the charism of celibacy and chastity is present and embraced, the attractions, the impulses, the desires will still be present. So the first thing you need to do is be aware that you are a human being, and no matter how saintly or holy you are, you will never remove yourself from those passions. But the idea was making prudent choices. You just walk away. Celibacy is a radical call, and you’ve made a decision not to act on your desire.” Today, seminaries say they screen applicants rigorously. In Boston, for example, a young man must begin conversations with the vocations director a year before applying for admissions, and then the application process takes at least four months. Most seminaries require that applicants be celibate for as long as five years before starting the program, just to test out the practice, and students are expected to remain celibate throughout seminary as they continue to discern whether they are cut out to lead the sexless life of an ordained priest. Some seminaries screen out applicants who say they are sexually attracted to other men, but most do not, arguing that there is no evidence linking sexual orientation to one’s ability to lead a celibate life. The seminaries attempt to weed out potential child abusers, running federal and local criminal background checks, but there is currently no psychological test that can accurately predict whether a man who has never sexually abused a child is likely to do so in the future. So seminary officials say that in the screening process, and throughout seminary training, they are alert to any sign that a man is not forming normal relationships with adults, or seems abnormally interested in children. Many potential applicants are turned away from seminaries, and every year some students are forced out. “Just because there’s a shortage doesn’t mean we should lessen our standards,” said Rev. Edward J. Burns,

In 1933 things were still being taught in the higher educational establishments which had been proven by science to be false as long ago as 1899. The young man who wishes to keep abreast of the times, therefore, had to accept a double load on his unfortunate brain. In a hundred years' time, the number of people wearing spectacles, and the size of the human brain, will both have increased considerably; but the people will be none the more intelligent. What they will look like, with their enormous, bulging heads, it is better not to try to imagine; they will probably be quite content with their own appearance, but if things continue in the manner predicted by the scientists, I think we can count ourselves lucky that we shall not live to see them! When I was a schoolboy, I did all I could to get out into the open air as much as possible—my school reports bear witness to that ! In spite of this, I grew up into a reasonably intelligent young man, I developed along very normal lines, and I learnt a lot of things of which my schoolfellows learnt nothing. In short, our system of education is the exact opposite of that practised in the gymnasia of ancient days. The Greek of the golden age sought a harmonious education; we succeed only in producing intellectual monsters. Without the introduction of conscription, we should have fallen into complete decadence, and it is thanks to this universal military service that the fatal process has been arrested. This I regard as one of the greatest events in history. When I recall my masters at school, I realise that half of them were abnormal; and the greater the distance from which I look back on them, the stronger is my conviction that I am quite right. The primary task of education is to train the brain of the young. It is quite impossible to recognise the potential aspirations of a child of ten. In old days teachers strove always to seek out each pupil's weak point, and by exposing and dwelling on it, they successfully killed the child's self-confidence. Had they, on the contrary, striven to find the direction in which each pupil's talents lay, and then concentrated on the development of those talents, they would have furthered education in its true sense. Instead, they sought mass-production by means of endless generalisations. A child who could not solve a mathematical equation, they said, would do no good in life. It is a wonder that they did not prophesy that he would come to a bad and shameful end! Have things changed much to-day, I wonder? I am not sure, and many of the things I see around me incline me to the opinion that they have not.

As a nine-year-old, the circadian rhythm would have the child asleep by around nine p.m., driven in part by the rising tide of melatonin at this time in children. By the time that same individual has reached sixteen years of age, their circadian rhythm has undergone a dramatic shift forward in its cycling phase. The rising tide of melatonin, and the instruction of darkness and sleep, is many hours away. As a consequence, the sixteen-year-old will usually have no interest in sleeping at nine p.m. Instead, peak wakefulness is usually still in play at that hour. By the time the parents are getting tired, as their circadian rhythms take a downturn and melatonin release instructs sleep—perhaps around ten or eleven p.m., their teenager can still be wide awake. A few more hours must pass before the circadian rhythm of a teenage brain begins to shut down alertness and allow for easy, sound sleep to begin. This, of course, leads to much angst and frustration for all parties involved on the back end of sleep. Parents want their teenager to be awake at a “reasonable” hour of the morning. Teenagers, on the other hand, having only been capable of initiating sleep some hours after their parents, can still be in their trough of the circadian downswing. Like an animal prematurely wrenched out of hibernation too early, the adolescent brain still needs more sleep and more time to complete the circadian cycle before it can operate efficiently, without grogginess. If this remains perplexing to parents, a different way to frame and perhaps appreciate the mismatch is this: asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m. Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults, and that they are biologically wired to obtain that sleep at a different time from their parents. It’s very understandable for parents to feel frustrated in this way, since they believe that their teenager’s sleep patterns reflect a conscious choice and not a biological edict. But non-volitional, non-negotiable, and strongly biological they are. We parents would be wise to accept this fact, and to embrace it, encourage it, and praise it, lest we wish our own children to suffer developmental brain abnormalities or force a raised risk of mental illness upon them.

Dr. Sherman VanMeter has made a career of unpacking the densest areas of scientific endeavor in accessible—if not polite—terms. You’ve written books on everything from astrophysics to zoology. How are you able to achieve expertise in so many disparate fields? There’s a perception that scientific disciplines are separate countries, when in fact science is a universal passport. It’s about exploring and thinking critically, not memorization. A question mark, not a period. Can you give me an example? Sure. Kids learn about the solar system by memorizing the names of planets. That’s a period. It’s also scientifically useless, because names have no value. The question mark would be to say instead, “There are hundreds of thousands of sizable bodies orbiting the sun. Which ones are exceptional? What makes them so? Are there similarities? What do they reveal?” But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity? You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions. Sounds more like mysticism than science. How do you draw the line? That’s where the critical thinking comes in. I can see how that applies to the categorization of solar objects. But what about more abstract questions? It works there too. Take love, for example. Artists would tell you that love is a mysterious force. Priests claim it’s a manifestation of the divine. Biochemists, on the other hand, will tell you that love is a feedback loop of dopamine, testosterone, phenylethylamine, norepinephrine, and feel-my-pee-pee. The difference is, we can show our work. So you’re not a romantic, then? We’re who we are as a species because of evolution. And at the essence, evolution is the steady production of increasingly efficient killing machines. Isn’t it more accurate to say “surviving machines”? The two go hand in hand. But the killing is the prime mover; without that, the surviving doesn’t come into play. Kind of a cold way to look at the world, isn’t it? No, it’s actually an optimistic one. There’s a quote I love from the anthropologist Robert Ardrey: “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.” You used that as the epigraph to your new book, God Is an Abnorm. But I noticed you left out the last line, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Why? That’s where Ardrey’s poetic license gets the better of his science, which is a perilous mistake. We aren’t “known among the stars” at all. The sun isn’t pondering human nature, the galaxy isn’t sitting in judgment. The universe doesn’t care about us. We’ve evolved into what we are because humanity’s current model survived and previous iterations didn’t. Simple as that. Why is a little artistic enthusiasm a perilous mistake? Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.

Demand answers for what?” “We were supposed to check for genetic abnormalities while you were pregnant, and if we found anything, the child was supposed to be aborted. They’ll ask us why we didn’t and then they’ll want to take him away,” “Can they do that?” “Unfortunately, they can. Are you up to facing them?” “I’ll do my best,” “If you want, take the kids and go shopping or go to the park. But, that’s up to you.” “I’ll stay. We need to show the government we aren’t afraid of their stupid policies or their goose-stepping goons.” she said,

Naturally, her situation as an only child meant that there were times in her early years when she was lonely. Worse than this, however, in Elizabeth’s own harsh opinion of herself, was that her role as the only child of an invalid mother turned her into “a neurotic selfish little beast.”80 In my early years no one expected that my mother would live long. She herself was quite sure she would not, and like so many sensitive extroverts her own suffering caused her not only to be acutely aware of illness in others but even to imagine it was there when it was not. She considered me a delicate child who might not live long either… (Like Isaac in The Dean’s Watch perhaps, who “had always been a delicate and abnormally sensitive child, prone as the delicate are to seek a little comfort for himself here and there, and dangerously indulged by his equally delicate mother.

He was not a monster, she said. People say he was a monster, but he was not one. What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation. A big child, she would have said to herself. Her heart would have melted, she'd have smoothed the hair back from his forehead, kissed him on the ear, and not just to get something out of him either. The instinct to soothe, to make it better. There there, she'd say, as he woke from a nightmare. Things are so hard for you. All this she would have believed, because otherwise how could she have kept on living? She was very ordinary, under that beauty. She believed in decency, she was nice to the Jewish maid, or nice enough, nicer than she needed to be.

Though the United Kingdom limits elective abortions later in pregnancy, a woman may obtain an abortion at any point until birth if her child is diagnosed with “such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped,” a category that includes nonfatal disabilities such as Down syndrome, clubfoot, or cleft palate.

handful of neural systems in the brain that, if poorly regulated or abnormal, can cause dysfunction in all four of the main brain areas—just like what I was seeing with Tina.

What is sensory integration therapy? This form of occupational therapy helps children and adults with SPD (sensory processing disorder) use all their senses together. These are the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. Sensory integration therapy is claimed to help people with SPD respond to sensory inputs such as light, sound, touch, and others; and change challenging or repetitive behaviours. Someone in the family may have trouble receiving and responding to information through their senses. This is a condition called sensory processing disorder (SPD). These people are over-sensitive to things in their surroundings. This disorder is commonly identified in children and with conditions like autism spectrum disorder. The exact cause of sensory processing disorder is yet to be identified. However, previous studies have proven that over-sensitivity to light and sound has a strong genetic component. Other studies say that those with sensory processing conditions have abnormal brain activity when exposed simultaneously to light and sound. Treatment for sensory processing disorder in children and adults is called sensory integration therapy. Therapy sessions are play-oriented for children, so they should be fun and playful. This may include the use of swings, slides, and trampolines and may be able to calm an anxious child. In addition, children can make appropriate responses. They can also perform more normally. SPD can also affect adults Someone who struggles with SPD should consider receiving occupational therapy, which has an important role in identifying and treating sensory integration issues. Occupational therapists are health professionals using different therapeutic approaches so that people can do every work they need to do, inside and outside their homes. Through occupational therapy, affected individuals are helped to manage their immediate and long-term sensory symptoms. Sensory integration therapy for adults, especially for people living with dementia or Alzheimer's disease, may use everyday sounds, objects, foods, and other items to rouse their feelings and elicit positive responses. Suppose an adult is experiencing agitation or anxiety. In that case, soothing music can calm them, or smelling a scent familiar to them can help lessen their nervous excitement and encourage relaxation, as these things can stimulate their senses. Seniors with Alzheimer's/Dementia can regain their ability to connect with the world around them. This can help improve their well-being overall and quality of life. What Are The Benefits of Sensory Integration Therapy Sensory integration treatment offers several benefits to people with SPD: * efficient organisation of sensory information. These are the things the brain collects from one's senses - smell, touch, sight, etc. * Active involvement in an exploration of the environment. * Maximised ability to function in recreational and other daily activities. * Improved independence with daily living activities. * Improved performance in the home, school, and community. * self-regulations. Affected individuals get the ability to understand and manage their behaviours and understand their feelings about things that happen around them. * Sensory systems modulation. If you are searching for an occupational therapist to work with for a family with a sensory processing disorder, check out the Mission Walk Therapy & Rehabilitation Centre. The occupational therapy team of Mission Walk uses individualised care plans, along with the most advanced techniques, so that patients can perform games, school tasks, and other day-to-day activities with their best functional skills. Call Mission Walk today for more information or a free consultation on sensory integration therapy. Our customer service staff will be happy to help.

44. But for most people it is through the power process—having a goal, making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goal—that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate opportunity to go through the power process the consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc.6

There were four people in the room. All men. All with their mouths open in shock. There was Dr Houllier, at his desk. Two guys in suits, maybe in their forties, near the door. And one in the centre, facing me. He looked like he was in his sixties. He had an angular face with a burn scar on his left cheek. It was triangle-shaped. He had bulging eyes. Abnormally long arms and legs. Three fingers were missing from his right hand. He was using his thumb and remaining finger to pinch the bezel of his watch. I said, ‘Dendoncker?’ He didn’t react. I jumped off the tray. He fumbled in his jacket pocket. Produced a gun. A revolver. An NAA-22S. It was a tiny little thing. Less than four inches long.

What started in the 1990s as a small group of abnormal, weird, and deviant disciples has since ballooned into a tremendous political force in our schools.

The late biologist Peter Medawar provides a compelling analogy to illustrate the fallacy. An inherited disorder called phenylketonuria (PKU) is caused by a rarely occurring abnormal gene that results in a failure to metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine in the body. As the amino acid starts accumulating in the child’s brain, he becomes profoundly retarded. The cure is simple. If you diagnose it early enough, all you do is withhold phenylalanine-containing foods from the diet and the child grows up with an entirely normal IQ. Now imagine two boundary conditions. Assume there is a planet where the gene is uncommon and phenylalanine is everywhere, like oxygen or water, and is indispensable for life. On this planet, retardation caused by PKU, and therefore variance in IQ in the population, would be entirely attributable to the PKU gene. Here you would be justified in saying that retardation was a genetic disorder or that IQ was inherited. Now consider another planet in which the converse is true: Everyone has the PKU gene but phenylalanine is rare. On this planet you would say that PKU is an environmental disorder caused by a poison called phenylalanine, and most of the variance in IQ is caused by the environment. This example shows that when the interaction between two variables is labyrinthine it is meaningless to ascribe percentage values to the contribution made by either. And if this is true for just one gene interacting with one environmental variable, the argument must hold with even greater force for something as complex and multifactorial as human intelligence, since genes interact not only with the environment but with each other.

My awakening was difficult and long but I did not have to make it on my own. Everyone I met forced me to awake. My parents said I was completely abnormal, not human or normal at all, not like any other child they had ever seen. Then psychologists told me I have a very high capacity to analyze others and make proper deductions, which are very uncommon in human beings. The philosophers I met were astonished at my innate capacity to see things they could not among texts they supposedly should know better than me. And finally, in religious groups, I was able to scare the highest rankings among them, by showing an ability to see that they had to develop through decades of hard work. None of them told me I was an alien but every single person I met has alienated me against my will. At the end of this journey, the awakening was too clear to be rejected. And once I accepted it, everything else was added to me, including my forgotten memories in other planets.

My awakening was difficult and long but I did not have to make it on my own. Everyone I met forced me to awake. My parents said I was completely abnormal, not human or normal at all, not like any other child they had ever seen. Then psychologists told me I have a very high capacity to analyze others and make proper deductions, which are very uncommon in human beings. The philosophers I met were astonished at my innate capacity to see things they could not among texts they supposedly should know better than me. And finally, in religious groups, I was able to scare the highest rankings among them, by showing an ability to see that they had to develop through decades of hard work. None of them told me I was an alien but every single person I met has alienated me against my will. At the end of this journey, the awakening was too clear to be rejected. And once I accepted it, everything else was added to me, including my forgotten memories from other planets.

And the child, even when he can do without the protecting parent in times of ordinary stress, still carries within him the image of the strong and powerful parent to reassure himself. “If a burglar came into our house, my father would kill him dead.” The protective function of the parent is so vital in early childhood that even children who are exposed to abnormal dangers may not develop acute anxiety if the parents are present. It is now well known that in war-time Britain the children who remained with their parents even during bombing attacks were able to tolerate anxiety better than the children who were separated from their parents and evacuated to protected zones. But

We know that the infant and very small child need to feel that they can count on these powerful beings to relieve tension and alleviate fears. And we know that the child’s later ability to tolerate tension and actively deal with anxiety situations will be determined in good part by the experiences of early years. During the period of infancy, of biological helplessness, we make very few demands upon the child and do everything possible to reduce tension and satisfy all needs. Gradually, as the child develops, he acquires means of his own to deal with increasingly complex situations. The parent gradually relinquishes his function as insulator and protector. But we know that even the most independent children will need to call upon the protection of parents at times of unusual stress. And the child, even when he can do without the protecting parent in times of ordinary stress, still carries within him the image of the strong and powerful parent to reassure himself. “If a burglar came into our house, my father would kill him dead.” The protective function of the parent is so vital in early childhood that even children who are exposed to abnormal dangers may not develop acute anxiety if the parents are present. It is now well known that in war-time Britain the children who remained with their parents even during bombing attacks were able to tolerate anxiety better than the children who were separated from their parents and evacuated to protected zones. But

ProLiteracy Worldwide’s “President’s Report on the State of Adult Literacy 2006” found that 70 percent of prison inmates in America lacked basic literacy.2 The Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology reported “robust links between severe, persistent reading problems and increased risk for depressed mood” in boys age seven to ten.3 We now have evidence that the inability to read is a risk factor for depression. Reading is powerful; not reading is dangerous.

Meiosis is an elegant process but in any organism errors in meiosis sometimes occur. These errors may be the result of mistakes in separation of the chromosomes during division or of an incorrect exchange of genetic information during chiasma formation. Many genetic disorders in humans can be traced back to errors in the formation of the gametes in meiosis. Mistakes in meiosis can result in an abnormal number of chromosomes in an egg or sperm cell. If this egg or sperm is then involved in fertilization, the zygote will exhibit an abnormal number of chromosomes. The child produced from this zygote (following mitosis and differentiation) will have cells with too few or too many chromosomes

THE UNDERSTANDING OF abnormal could only be viewed as an adult, looking back. As a child, there was no barometer for normal other than not feeling under siege.

Lieutenant Walter Haut, who testified in 2002 that he was taken out to a hangar by Colonel Blanchard to view recovered child-sized bodies with abnormally large heads, lying under a tarpaulin at the base.

William’s difficulties were typical. He was a three-and-a-half-year-old who had always had trouble settling at bedtime and during the night. Six months before I saw him he had moved from a crib into a bed, and his bedtime rituals had changed: instead of rocking him to sleep, his parents would lie down with him for a while. He usually fell asleep fairly quickly, although if his parents tried to leave his bed too soon he would wake up. Once he was deeply asleep, they could quietly sneak away. William would sleep for three or four hours, then wake up and call for his parents. He sometimes complained about being scared or seeing monsters, but he never seemed truly frightened. If his parents didn’t answer his calls, he grew more demanding; sometimes he went to their room and refused to return to his bed. William’s parents, concerned about what they interpreted as nighttime anxiety, always took him back to his bed and lay down with him, knowing he would go back to sleep in five or ten minutes and then they could sneak away again. Usually he would wake up one or two more times and repeat the whole routine. But occasionally one of the parents fell asleep in William’s bed, and when that happened, William slept through the rest of the night without difficulty. William’s problem, like Betsy’s, was not abnormal wakings but inappropriate associations: he could not fall asleep unless one of his parents was lying down with him. And that was a problem for William’s parents, because they wanted to sleep by themselves, in their own bed.

It would probably be best if they were separated, anyway," Margo continued. "They're feeling very close now, but it's an abnormal situation. They might be developing a dependency which would interfere with their resocialization later." She sounded like a textbook on child psychology that Maddy had once read. Reasonable, and yet somehow wrong. Maddy's own intuition was that if you found someone you liked and trusted, you held on for dear life.

As the body and mind deteriorate, the dying are not less themselves. Dementia steals the faculties for expressing the self—language, memory, personality—but the self remains, albeit largely inaccessible to others. The experience of actually being with the demented and dying is one of watching someone move farther and farther away, out of earshot and eventually out of sight. It’s wrong to think, “Because I cannot access something, it does not exist.” Being with someone who is near death undermines such nonsense. If people are as much themselves when there is no chance of further accomplishment, activity, or self-expression, then the fact that the unborn may grow up to great accomplishment, activity, or self-expression is irrelevant. That a precious child with Down syndrome may some day compete in the Special Olympics is irrelevant. Another precious child with a different genetic abnormality will spend all his days in a state that most of us will inhabit only at the end of our lives, if ever: incapable of communication, incontinent, compromised in language, memory, intellect, and personality. The compassion we show to the dying is not earned by the things they “used to be” any more than it should be earned by the things that the unborn might become. We will all end up in a state of total incapacity and inaccessibility, some for a long time and some only briefly.

3. Here ‘the attraction of sexual intercourse between parents and child or grandchild as incest’, ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘abnormal attachment of persons without power of resisting emotions called fixations’, stimulates characters to meet their tragic flaw.

Here ‘the attraction of sexual intercourse between parents and child or grandchild as incest’, ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘abnormal attachment of persons without power of resisting emotions called fixations’, stimulates characters to meet their tragic flaw. Says Bhutta about European fault

Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced.

From the shameful part, I meditated on receiving and getting connected with the true self’s assurance and understanding. I was able to direct my true self to ask this trait if it needed anything else and how it wanted to release the degradation it held in. It wanted the disgraceful memories erased, as well as removing the chill and sickness in its gut when they flashed instinctively and uncontrollably in its mind. It sought to have all the unmanageable sexual images of its imagination controlled and reprogrammed with normal thoughts. It wanted to feel like it was not a consenting party to the abnormal sexual perversions that were forced upon a young child. The shameful part within me wanted reassurance that the creature I thought I had become was the result of a young mind being molded from wickedness thrust upon it during peak developmental years. It wanted to stop having to always look over its shoulder thinking it had done something wrong. It wanted to wake up in the morning at peace, not immediately expecting the worst. The shame within wanted to stop feeling like bad things were going to happen in life because it was not a good person. It wanted to feel it deserved to be happy and worthy of receiving the good things of this life. After relinquishing all the burdens of the shameful part and communicating what it wanted from the true self, I continued meditating on the connection of the true self’s understanding and the shameful part’s acceptance of that understanding. I visualized unburdening the shame like the outer tarnished skin being removed from a banana, envisioning the negative self-perceptions of myself peeling away and exposing the true clean, white, sweet goodness within. CHAPTER

Jennifer thought it must be abnormal for such a young child to be thinking about diets, let alone wanting boys to like her for being “pretty” and “sexy.

14 One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. 2 There in front of him was a man suffering from abnormal swelling of his body. 3 Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” 4 But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way. 5 Then he asked them, “If one of you has a child[a] or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?” 6 And they had nothing to say. 7 When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: 8 “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. 9 If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. 10 But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. 11 For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” 12 Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.

Autism is a neurobiological disorder. The structures of the brains of people with autism are atypical. Research is pointing to differences in overall brain size and the numbers of certain cells; to abnormalities in the cerebellum that affect motor, sensory, language, cognitive and attention functions; and to altered genes that interfere with brain development. A new “underconnectivity theory” suggests that autism interferes with efficient integration, timing, and synchronization of brain activation patterns. Autism, or the umbrella term, Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), is not one thing but many. Like SPD and LD, the term autism encompasses a wide array of symptoms. In broad terms, autism is a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) that affects verbal and nonverbal communication, social interaction, imagination, and problem-solving.

I remember a television program I saw once... The program was a documentary, about one of those wars. They interviewed people and showed clips from films of the time, black and white, and still photos... The interviews with people still alive then were in colour. The one I remember best was with a woman who had been the mistress of a man who had supervised one of the camps where they put the Jews, before they killed them. In ovens, my mother said... From what they said, the man had been cruel and brutal... The woman said she didn't notice much that she found unusual. She denied knowing about the ovens. ...He was not a monster, she said. People say he was a monster, but he was not one. What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit for little pieces of raw steak. How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation. A big child, she would have said to herself. Her heart would have melted, she'd have smoothed the hair back from his forehead, kissed him on the ear, and not just to get something out of him either. The instinct to soothe, to make it better. There there, she'd say, as he woke from a nightmare. Things are so hard for you. All this she would have believed, because otherwise how could she have kept on living? She was very ordinary, under that beauty. She believed in decency, she was nice to the Jewish maid, or nice enough, nicer than she needed to be. Several days after this interview with her was filmed, she killed herself. It said that, right on television. Nobody asked her whether or not she had loved him. What I remember now, most of all, is the makeup.

My awakening was difficult and long but I did not have to make it on my own. Everyone I met forced me to awake. My parents said I was completely abnormal, not human or normal at all, not like any other child they had ever seen. Then psychologists told me I have a very high capacity to analyze others and make proper deductions, which are very uncommon in human beings. The philosophers I met were astonished with my innate capacity to see things they could not among texts they supposedly should know better than me. And finally, in religious groups, I was able to scare the ones in highest ranks among them, by showing an ability to see that they had to develop through decades of hard work. None of them told me I was an alien but every single person I met has alienated me against my will. At the end of this journey, the awakening was too clear to be rejected. And once I accepted it, everything else was added to me, including my forgotten memories from other planets.

Until quite recently, psychiatrists believed that schizophrenia was a psychological illness caused by stress and upbringing, particularly by the influence of a "schizophrenogenic mother" who did not provide her child with enough maternal warmth and care. Today, this theory has been soundly discredited. Schizophrenia, as we now know, is a disease caused by abnormal brain structure and function, just as heart disease is a product of faulty arteries.

Yep, this Unit will mess with your head like nothing you have ever seen before.” I scoffed. I was twenty-eight years old with an amazing girlfriend and figured I was Superman. Sure enough, in the end he was right. In the Sexual Assault Unit, you spend ten hours a day exposed to some of the sickest material you can possibly imagine. Eighty percent of the caseload involves the sexual abuse of children, and the rest consists of rape, child pornography, and, for a change of pace, the occasional sexual abuse of an animal. It doesn’t take long to recognize that, with a few notable exceptions, almost every defendant is a man. You end up immersed in the very worst of male sexuality, and it inevitably takes a toll. Deviant, abnormal, and very, very hard to get out of your head when you get home. The warning