Alarm Label Quotes

There will be guards,” Bast said. “And traps. And alarms. You can bet the house is heavily charmed to keep out gods.” “Magicians can do that?” I asked. I imagined a big can of pesticide labeled God-Away.

Now, as I’ve suggested before, what is adaptive for children living in chaotic, violent, trauma-permeated environments becomes maladaptive in other environments-especially school. The hypervigilance of the Alert state is mistaken for ADHD; the resistance and defiance of Alarm and Fear get labeled as oppositional defiant disorder; flight behavior gets them suspended from school; fight behavior gets them charged with assault. The pervasive misunderstanding of trauma-related behavior has a profound effect on our educational, mental health, and juvenile justice systems.

Describe how you’ve perceived yourself in the following situations over the past several months—with your significant other, at work, with the kids or team, in social situations with strangers. Now ask, “Is that who I really see myself being in the future?” How would my future self look, feel, and behave differently in those situations? If you could describe yourself in just three aspirational words—words that would sum up who you are at your best in the future—what would those words be? Why are those words meaningful to you? Once you find your words, put them in your phone as an alarm label that goes off several times per day.

Johnson stigmatizes words of which he disapproves. He does this by applying denigratory labels to them. ‘To ponder on’ is ‘improper’, ‘ambassadress’ is ‘ludicrous’, ‘bouncer’ (meaning ‘an empty threatener’) is ‘colloquial’, ‘overwhelmingly’ is ‘inelegant’, the alarming-sounding ‘to powder’ (‘to come tumultuously and violently’) is ‘corrupt’, ‘coxcomical’ is ‘unworthy of use’, ‘from hence’ is ‘vitious’,

She was interviewing one of my favorite television actors, Don Johnson of Miami Vice. As he reclined on a couch in his lovely home, Don told Barbara about the joys and difficulties in his life. He talked of past struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and work addiction. Then he spoke of his relationships with women—how exciting and attractive he found them. I could see his energy rise and his breath quicken as he spoke. An air of intoxication seemed to fill the room. Don said his problem was he liked women too much and found it hard to be with one special partner over a long period. He would develop a deep friendship and intimacy, but then his eyes would wander. I thought to myself, this man has been sexually abused! His problems sounded identical to those of adult survivors I counsel in my practice. But then I reconsidered: Maybe I’ve been working too hard. Perhaps I’m imagining a sexual abuse history that isn’t really there. Then it happened. Barbara leaned forward and, with a smile, asked, “Don, is it true that you had your first sexual relationship when you were quite young, about twelve years old, with your seventeen-year-old baby-sitter?” My jaw dropped. Don grinned back at Barbara. He cocked his head to the side; a twinkle came into his blue eyes. “Yeah,” he said, “and I still get excited just thinking about her today.” Barbara showed no alarm. The next day I wrote Barbara Walters a letter, hoping to enlighten her about the sexual abuse of boys. Had Don been a twelve-year-old girl and the baby-sitter a seventeen-year-old boy, we wouldn’t hesitate to call what had happened rape. It would make no difference how cooperative or seemingly “willing” the victim had been. The sexual contact was exploitive and premature, and would have been whether the twelve-year-old was a boy or a girl. This past experience and perhaps others like it may very well be at the root of the troubles Don Johnson has had with long-term intimacy. Don wasn’t “lucky to get a piece of it early,” as some people might think. He was sexually abused and hadn’t yet realized it.   Acknowledging past sexual abuse is an important step in sexual healing. It helps us make a connection between our present sexual issues and their original source. Some survivors have little difficulty with this step: They already see themselves as survivors and their sexual issues as having stemmed directly from sexual abuse. A woman who is raped sees an obvious connection if she suddenly goes from having a pleasurable sex life to being terrified of sex. For many survivors, however, acknowledging sexual abuse is a difficult step. We may recall events, but through lack of understanding about sexual abuse may never have labeled those experiences as sexual abuse. We may have dismissed experiences we had as insignificant. We may have little or no memory of past abuse. And we may have difficulty fully acknowledging to ourselves and to others that we were victims. It took me years to realize and admit that I had been raped on a date, even though I knew what had happened and how I felt about it. I needed to understand this was in fact rape and that I had been a victim. I needed to remember more and to stop blaming myself before I was able to acknowledge my experience as sexual abuse.

Your womb can’t never bear fruit.” Miss Ethel Fordham told her that. Without sorrow or alarm, she had passed along the news as though she’d examined a Burpee seedling overcome by marauding rabbits. Cee didn’t know then what to feel about that news, no more than what she felt about Dr. Beau. Anger wasn’t available to her—she had been so stupid, so eager to please. As usual she blamed being dumb on her lack of schooling, but that excuse fell apart the second she thought about the skilled women who had cared for her, healed her. Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing. And they knew how to repair what an educated bandit doctor had plundered. If not schooling, then what? Branded early as an unlovable, barely tolerated “gutter child” by Lenore, the only one whose opinion mattered to her parents, exactly like what Miss Ethel said, she had agreed with the label and believed herself worthless. Ida never said, “You my child. I dote on you. You wasn’t born in no gutter. You born into my arms. Come on over here and let me give you a hug.” If not her mother, somebody somewhere should have said those words and meant them. Frank alone valued her. While his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her. Should it have? Why was that his job and not her own? Cee didn’t know any soft, silly women. Not Thelma, or Sarah, or Ida, and certainly not the women who had healed her. Even Mrs. K., who let the boys play nasty with her, did hair and slapped anybody who messed with her, in or outside her hairdressing kitchen. So it was just herself. In this world with these people she wanted to be the person who would never again need rescue. Not from Lenore through the lies of the Rat, not from Dr. Beau through the courage of Sarah and her brother. Sun-smacked or not, she wanted to be the one who rescued her own self. Did she have a mind, or not? Wishing would not make it so, nor would blame, but thinking might. If she did not respect herself, why should anybody else? Okay. She would never have children to care about and give her the status of motherhood. Okay. She didn’t have and probably would never have a mate. Why should that matter? Love? Please. Protection? Yeah, sure. Golden eggs? Don’t make me laugh. Okay. She was penniless. But not for long. She would have to invent a way to earn a living. What else?

Mental Accounting Alarm clocks and Christmas clubs are external devices people use to solve their self-control problems. Another way to approach these problems is to adopt internal control systems, otherwise known as mental accounting. Mental accounting is the system (sometimes implicit) that households use to evaluate, regulate, and process their home budget. Almost all of us use mental accounts, even if we’re not aware that we’re doing so. The concept is beautifully illustrated by an exchange between the actors Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman in one of those extra features offered on DVDs. Hackman and Hoffman were friends back in their starving artist days, and Hackman tells the story of visiting Hoffman’s apartment and having his host ask him for a loan. Hackman agreed to the loan, but then they went into Hoffman’s kitchen, where several mason jars were lined up on the counter, each containing money. One jar was labeled “rent,” another “utilities,” and so forth. Hackman asked why, if Hoffman had so much money in jars, he could possibly need a loan, whereupon Hoffman pointed to the food jar, which was empty. According to economic theory (and simple logic), money is “fungible,” meaning that it doesn’t come with labels. Twenty dollars in the rent jar can buy just as much food as the same amount in the food jar. But households adopt mental accounting schemes that violate fungibility for the same reasons that organizations do: to control spending. Most organizations have budgets for various activities, and anyone who has ever worked in such an organization has experienced the frustration of not being able to make an important purchase because the relevant account is already depleted. The fact that there is unspent money in another account is considered no more relevant than the money sitting in the rent jar on Dustin Hoffman’s kitchen counter.

Now I know this might be alarming, especially given that this book is written for those of you pushed and pulled in the middle layer of a hierarchy. I’m not advocating that the work of those once-labeled managers go away. I’m advocating that you fulfill a higher calling than looking over the shoulders of your employees to see that they get their work done. The higher calling that I’m whispering not so quietly into your ear is to create an environment that positions people to do their best work and also become better human beings. I know that some of you will find this book supporting what you’re already doing. In short, you’re not commanding anyone. You’re coming alongside people and learning how best to support them. I believe you’ll find the elements of an optimistic workplace to be a good addition to your leadership repertoire and philosophy.

How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8.30 am by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” - Charles Bukowski.

Be with the experience and explore its different parts. Label them to yourself: tense…worried…annoyed…sad. This will increase activity in the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain behind your forehead), which will help with top-down self-control. Naming to yourself what you are experiencing will also decrease activity in the amygdala—which functions like an alarm bell in the brain—and help you calm down.

The attempt to create a total cultural environment and to silence or intimidate opponents is part of a campaign that had once seemed promising, even to those—yourself included—alarmed at the irrationality and anti-intellectuality unleashed by many of the most vocal proponents of the new fundamentalism. But concepts with some genuine merit—like “privilege,” “appropriation,” and even “microaggression”—were very rapidly weaponized, and well-intentioned discussions of “identity,” “inequality,” and “disability” became the leading edge of new efforts to label and separate the saved and the damned, the “woke” and the benighted, the victim and the oppressor. Concepts useful in careful and nuanced discussions proved strikingly “amenable to over-extension,” as the cultural historian Rochelle Gurstein put it, and ideas suitable for addressing “psychological distress” were forced into the service of efforts to “[redress] the subordination of one people by another,” yielding not significant redress but a new wave of puritanism and a culture of suspicion

THE MAN WHO, MORE than any other private citizen, helped unite the country behind the idea of aiding Britain and opposing Germany spent the war promoting the importance of international cooperation after the conflict. Although he rejected an attempt by FDR to bring him into his administration, Wendell Willkie, whom one newspaper labeled “a vocal and patriotic alarm clock,” became a sort of ambassador-at-large for Roosevelt, traveling around the globe to meet with Allied heads of state, soldiers, and ordinary citizens.