Dilemma Relationship Quotes

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Suddenly the thought that the end of her life was imminent shocked him; it was one thing to pity someone he didn't know, quite another to face the same dilemma with someone he knew intimately. That was the trouble with beds. They turned strangers into intimates more quickly than ten years of polite teas in parlours.

In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

It’s like everyone has a central dilemma in their life, and mine was can you be in a committed, mature, loving adult relationship and still get invited to threesomes?" - Dexter Mayhew

Even though she would dream of love, respect, and unfettered romance... it was a cyclical dilemma in her life that she seemed to be most attracted to poisonous men.

What is most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.

A charge often levied against organic agriculture is that it is more philosophy than science. There's some truth to this indictment, if that it what it is, though why organic farmers should feel defensive about it is itself a mystery, a relic, perhaps, of our fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature. ... The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he's put in play--that the ducks and fishes are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious polyculture are his to harvest even so.

American adult children, and I think most adult children, seem to believe that they are entitled to a perfect relationship with their parents and if it can’t be perfect, if it is challenging in any way, then they are justified in abandonment because she/he is just too difficult to relate to.

The heart of the problem, I soon came to understand, was that with Pablo there must always be a victor and a vanquished. I could not be satisfied with being a victor, nor, I think, could anyone who is emotionally mature. There was nothing gained by being vanquished either, because with Pablo, the moment you were vanquished he lost all interest. Since I loved him, I couldn't afford to be vanquished. What does one do in a dilemma like that?

It’s funny, how for an entire lifetime we keep thinking ‘How’ will our life-partner look like, how will he be? How will he react to a particular situation? How will he get angry, and how will we love and pamper him? We have so many questions like if he will accept me the way I am? Or if I have to change for him? We all have made plans for our future, subconsciously. We don’t exactly plan out everything with a pen and paper, it’s something that happens automatically, just like an involuntary action. Whenever we are alone and our mood is good, we usually think about our life with our partner. The days and nights in his arms, and the time that we will reserve for him. But when all that turns into reality, it’s strikingly different. Everything that you thought, seems to be a joke, and life laughs at you from a distance! You are helpless and can’t do anything about it, but have to accept it the way it is. You are totally caught into a web of dilemmas and problems before you realize that this is the time you waited for, and that this is the time you dreamt about! You have to make efforts, compromises, sacrifices and you have to change yourselves too sometimes to make things work. You can never expect to get a partner exactly the way you thought or dreamt about. It’s always different in reality and it’s always tough to make both ends meet for a relationship to work, but you have to! It’s your relationship, if you won’t work for it, who else will?

The Porcupine’s Dilemma, as it’s now known, is our dilemma, too. We need others to survive, but others can hurt us. Relationships demand constant course corrections, and even the most skilled navigators get pricked now and then.

A word of caution comes from Richard A. Gardner, MD who wrote a book titled “The Parental Alienation Syndrome”.  Dr. Garner said “Only terminate your relationship with your parents in the most extreme of circumstances and only then after careful counseling and guidance from a professional.”  Your entire identity is tied up in who they are, their historical systems and beliefs trouncing around your family history.

Child of someone, friend of someone, employee of someone, lover of something and hater of something... You identify yourself always in relation to someone or something. You are like a car tethered to other cars from all directions, which in turn are tethered to other cars. Result is stress, dilemmas, conflicts.

That's the thing with you people. You think you could love someone one second and hate them the next. Well, you can't.

While active listening is crucial for optimal communication, we are faced with a dilemma which can perplex even the sincerest and engaged of individuals.

When we see ourselves in a relationship of love with God, there is always something of a lover's dilemma, a struggle to give and receive, to trust and obey the call.

Aside from the parent-child relationship, we do not expect our relatives and friends to have any more power over us than we grant them out of respect or affection.

Gladstone had read Weintraub’s book, The Abraham Dilemma, in which he analyzed the relationship between a God who demanded the sacrifice of a son and the human race who agreed to it. Weintraub had reasoned that the Old Testament Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.

Here is a short form list of what is happening to your life: 1. You are practicing hate. 2. You are practicing violent abuse toward your parents and to your own family. 3. The way you treat your parents causes them physical and emotional pain. 4. The way you treat your parents causes them to develop mental diseases such as PTSD, depression, obsessive thoughts, low self esteem, aggressive and self destructive behavior, distrust of entering relationships, isolation, anxiety, panic attacks and obsessive thought of suicide. 5. The way you treat your parents causes them to develop physical illnesses such as chronic toxic stress which leads to inflammation of body organs which leads to heart attacks, arthritis, and irritable bowel syndrome. 6. The way you treat your parents produces feelings of abandonment and ostracism which is experience as physical pain on a

When we think of people giving up on their marriage, divorce usually comes to mind. But many people who give up on their marriage (or themselves or their partner) don’t leave; they stay in the comfort cycle—until their marriage presents the inevitable dilemma: venture into the growth cycle or face divorce, loss of integrity, or living death. Validating and soothing each other has its place in marriage—but not when you’re dependent on it. You get stuck in the comfort cycle because neither of you has the strength or motivation to break out. That’s when the other side of the process comes in: holding onto yourself (self-confrontation and self-soothing).

daily basis.  This is torture. 7. The way you treat your parents shortens their life expectancy by 11.4%.  That takes away about 9 ½ years of life on the average. 8. The way you treat your parents condemns them to living alone without close relationships experiencing severe loneliness the remainder of their lives. 9. The way you treat your parents is a hate crime against your own children and those of 3 generations to follow you. 10. The way you treat your parents condemns your own children to depression, low self esteem, the inability to love unconditionally and potential addictive behavior. Imagine what it is doing to you and your family or better yet go to a doctor and ask.

Existential isolation, a third given, refers to the unbridgeable gap between self and others, a gap that exists even in the presence of deeply gratifying interpersonal relationships. One is isolated not only from other beings but, to the extent that one constitutes one’s world, from world as well. Such isolation is to be distinguished from two other types of isolation: interpersonal and intrapersonal isolation. One experiences interpersonal isolation, or loneliness, if one lacks the social skills or personality style that permit intimate social interactions. Intrapersonal isolation occurs when parts of the self are split off, as when one splits off emotion from the memory of an event. The most extreme, and dramatic, form of splitting, the multiple personality, is relatively rare (though growing more widely recognized); when it does occur, the therapist may be faced (...) with the bewildering dilemma of which personality to cherish.

Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there’s such a thing as love, and whether it’s redemptive, become vastly different. And the structures with which you can communicate those dilemmas, or have characters struggle with them, seem to become appropriate and then inappropriate again and so on.

Winnicott, I think, would have enjoyed the observation made by novelist Fay Weldon: “The greatest advantage of not having children must be that you can go on believing you are a nice person. Once you have children, you understand how wars start.” All relationships,

This false solution is last for a reason. Doing without is the final resting place of many who have tried the first six false solutions. It is where people go who have given up hoping for relationship. It is a place of quiet despair. When doing the same, the opposite, too much, nothing, for others, and to yourself fall through, you are left looking at yourself, alone, in a mirror. The very isolation of the dilemma is a judgment on you. It judges in several ways, telling you things like: You aren’t meant for safe people. You don’t qualify. You’ve been asking for too much. You can’t get it right. You are too damaged to have relationships. You aren’t spiritual enough. Typically, people who are trying this last false solution don’t make a big fuss about things. They get their lives in order. They bury themselves in work, service, or other worthwhile venues. And they try not to think about what they’re doing without. The disconnected part of the soul isn’t a very rude or demanding entity. It tends to die quietly, gradually withering away like a starving infant. After a period of time, you may no longer even be able to feel the pain of isolation. At that point, less pain but more damage is occurring. If you are in this position, part of you is still alive. You’re reading this book—even if you’re weary, cynical, and with no hope. But you are taking a step.

Of course I’d like to marry a practising Muslim, someone I can share my life and also my religion with, but I just haven’t met the right man yet,’ I told her. Fadwa was sympathetic and understood my dilemma. ‘Concentrate on your relationship with God; purify yourself, your life and your intentions. Better your religion!’ she recommended. ‘If you are patient and steadfast, then you will be rewarded, insha’ Allah.

a single outburst does not produce a difficult relational environment. It is only when a parent [or anyone] repeatedly and regularly uses anger to close conversations, in the broadest sense of 'conversation,' that a dilemma is framed. When a parent [or partner] uses anger or the threat of anger to dominate the emotional atmosphere, then even potentially good conversations with them lose spontaneity, openness and honesty.

Your own death, or the death of your near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual and the unsatisfied demand to maintain the continuity of your relationship with that person for a nonexistent eternity. The arena for the continuation of all these "permanent" relationships is the tomorrow, heaven, next life, and so on. These things are the inventions of a mind interested only in it's undisturbed, permanent continuity in a "self" generated, fictitious future. The basic method of maintaining the continuity is the repetition of the question, "How? How? How?" "How am I to live? How can I be happy? How can I be sure I will be happy tomorrow?" This has made life an insoluble dilemma for us. We want to know, and through that knowledge we hope to continue on with our miserable existences forever.

The self is constituted within a variety of arenas and in relation to multiple traditions. Self-hood, on this understanding, is both provisional and open-ended, and critically depends on the configuration of relationships between one’s own groups and those cultures and values that are deemed ‘other’. The regulation of alterity becomes a defining attribute of self-hood, as my sense of who I am is crucially mediated by an understanding of that which I am not (paraphrasing William Connolly).

More than any USDA rule or regulation, this transparency is their best assurance that the meat they're buying has been humanely and cleanly processed. "You can't regulate integrity," Joel is fond of saying; the only genuine accountability comes from a producer's relationship with his or her customers, and their freedom "to come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around. If after seeing how we do things they want to buy food from us, that should be none of the government's business." Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology.

These stories are real, the dreams are real, yet the dilemmas each person faces are founded on the presences that haunt from their past. We see again the twin mechanisms present in all relationships: projection and transference. Each of them, meeting any stranger, reflexively scans the data of history for clues, expectations, possibilities. This scanning mechanism is instantaneous, mostly unconscious, and then the lens of history slips over one's eyes. This refractive lens alters the reality of the other and brings to consciousness a necessarily distorted picture. Attached to that particular lens is a particular history, the dynamics, the script, the outcomes of which are part of the transferred package. Freud once humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that those parents also import their own relational complexes from their parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate relationships not be congested arenas? As shopworn as the idea seems, we cannot overemphasize the importance of primal imagoes playing a domineering role in our relational patterns. They may be unconscious, which grants them inordinate power, or we may flee them, but they are always present. Thus, for example, wherever the parent is stuck—such as Damon's mother who only equates sexuality with the perverse and the unappealing, and his father who stands de-potentiated and co-opted—so the child will feel similarly constrained or spend his or her life trying to break away (“anything but that”) and still be defined by someone else's journey. How could Damon not feel depressed, then, at his own stuckness, and how could he not approach intimacy with such debilitating ambivalence?

The conditions that breed a disorganized attachment adaptation are not specific to CNM by any means, but I have seen a variation that is unique to CNM. There can be something very disorienting that happens for some new CNM couples who were first monogamous together and were accustomed to being each other’s main source of comfort, support and relief from distress. As the relationship opens, a partner’s actions with other people (even ethical ones that were agreed upon) can become a source of distress and pose an emotional threat. Everything that this person is doing with other people can become a source of intense fear and insecurity for their pre-existing partner, catapulting them into the paradoxical disorganized dilemma of wanting comfort and safety from the very same person who is triggering their threat response. Again, the partner may be doing exactly what the couple consented to and acting within their negotiated agreements, but for the pre-existing partner, their primary attachment figure being away, unavailable and potentially sharing levels of intimacy with another person registers as a debilitating threat in the nervous system. As someone in this situation simultaneously wants to move towards and away from one’s partner, the very foundation of their relationship and attachment system can begin to shudder, and people can begin acting out in ways that are destructive to each other and the relationship. When this happens, I recommend working with a professional to re-establish inner and outer safety.

We may finally summarize the emotional dilemma of the schizoid thus: he feels a deep dread of entering into a real personal relationship, i.e. one into which genuine feeling enters, because, though his need for a love-object is so great, he can only sustain a relationship at a deep emotional level on the basis of infantile and absolute dependence. To the love-hungry schizoid faced internally with an exciting but deserting object all relationships are felt to be 'swallowing-up things' which trap and imprison and destroy. If your hate is destructive you are still free to love because you can find someone else to hate. But if you feel your love is destructive the situation is terrifying. You are always impelled into a relationship by your needs and at once driven out again by the fear either of exhausting your love-object by the demands you want to make or else losing your own individuality by over-dependence and identification. This 'in and out' oscillation is the typical schizoid behaviour, and to escape from it into detachment and loss of feeling is the typical schizoid state. The schizoid feels faced with utter loss, and the destruction of both ego and object, whether in a relationship or out of it. In a relationship, identification involves loss of the ego, and incorporation involves a hungry devouring and losing of the object. In breaking away to independence, the object is destroyed as you fight a way out to freedom, or lost by separation, and the ego is destroyed or emptied by the loss of the object with whom it is identified. The only real solution is the dissolving of identification and the maturing of the personality, the differentiation of ego and object, and the growth of a capacity for cooperative independence and mutuality, i.e. psychic rebirth and development of a real ego.

FACING THE MUSIC Many years ago a man conned his way into the orchestra of the emperor of China although he could not play a note. Whenever the group practiced or performed, he would hold his flute against his lips, pretending to play but not making a sound. He received a modest salary and enjoyed a comfortable living. Then one day the emperor requested a solo from each musician. The flutist got nervous. There wasn’t enough time to learn the instrument. He pretended to be sick, but the royal physician wasn’t fooled. On the day of his solo performance, the impostor took poison and killed himself. The explanation of his suicide led to a phrase that found its way into the English language: “He refused to face the music.”2 The cure for deceit is simply this: face the music. Tell the truth. Some of us are living in deceit. Some of us are walking in the shadows. The lies of Ananias and Sapphira resulted in death; so have ours. Some of us have buried a marriage, parts of a conscience, and even parts of our faith—all because we won’t tell the truth. Are you in a dilemma, wondering if you should tell the truth or not? The question to ask in such moments is, Will God bless my deceit? Will he, who hates lies, bless a strategy built on lies? Will the Lord, who loves the truth, bless the business of falsehoods? Will God honor the career of the manipulator? Will God come to the aid of the cheater? Will God bless my dishonesty? I don’t think so either. Examine your heart. Ask yourself some tough questions. Am I being completely honest with my spouse and children? Are my relationships marked by candor? What about my work or school environment? Am I honest in my dealings? Am I a trustworthy student? An honest taxpayer? A reliable witness at work? Do you tell the truth . . . always? If not, start today. Don’t wait until tomorrow. The ripple of today’s lie is tomorrow’s wave and next year’s flood. Start today. Be just like Jesus. Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I’ve heard a lot of ladies say they want a guy who is good in bed (No, I don’t mean a guy who doesn’t snore), but I’m talking about a guy with sexual skills. I asked myself why skill is so important and the realization I came to was that it is proportional to sensuality. Essentially, skill predetermines the quality of both the journey and the destination, if you know what I mean. Many people have a desire for MORE or to go DEEPER, but their biggest limitation is in the area of skill. This reminds me of a story I heard of a boy who was sitting by the piano trying to create some music. He became frustrated with himself as he couldn’t play, but the desire to play and create music was there burning strong within him. Someone saw him in a dejected spirit and asked why he was distressed. The boy replied, “I can feel music in me but when I try to play it on the piano, I can’t get my hands right.” You see, there was a lot of sensual energy burning inside the boy, but his skill level was not proportional to that sensual energy. This confirms one of my usual sayings: when you know you were designed to be sensual, YOUR POTENTIAL HAUNTS YOU. And that’s the dilemma most people are facing in life and in their relationships today. Our sensuality is haunting us because it wants to fully express itself through our bodies, gifts and talents, but our skills are underdeveloped. One guy asked me, so does it mean we should go out there and sleep with as many girls as possible so we can develop our sexual skills? I responded, “There’s a huge difference between gaining sexual skills and gaining sensual skills.” Most people are obsessed with gaining sexual skills. That’s why porn is a billion dollar industry. But porn, in my opinion, doesn’t teach sensuality, not even a little bit. If anything, it teaches anti-sensuality. GAINING SEXUAL SKILLS IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO THE QUEST FOR “MORENESS.” (Read that again). Some people assume my business is sexual. It’s not. My business is sensual. I call people into a sensual space which is a far more exciting than any sexual skill they can ever acquire.

Handling Abusive or Disrespectful Behavior Decide what you want to say before the interaction. What are your goals? Are there particular points that you want to make sure you make? Write out the two or three most important things you want to say. If you’re particularly nervous, practice saying them out loud. Have an exit plan. How will you get off the phone or away from the interaction if it starts to head south? Consider prefacing the conversation with some ground rules if prior interactions have gone poorly. Say something like “I know these conversations haven’t gone very well when we’ve had them in the past, so let’s both make a good effort to keep it calm and reasonable, okay? Maybe you should tell me what you’d like to get out of the conversation and I’ll tell you what I’d like to get. How does that sound?” Express good intentions. “I really do want to understand what you’re saying. I would like to have a closer relationship with you.” Or “I’m sure these interactions haven’t felt very good to you in the past, either.” Start by expressing a belief in the child’s good intentions even if you don’t like how he or she is saying it. “I think that you’re telling me something that you really want me to understand. Something that you think is very important.” Describe your perception of your child’s dilemma that is causing them to talk to you in a disrespectful manner. “You must feel like I’m not going to understand unless you beat me over the head with it.” Describe your dilemma. “While I want to understand what you’re saying, it’s hard to focus on it when you’re yelling at me or calling me names. I’m sure you can understand that.” Ask for different behavior. “Do you think you could try to tell that to me in a calmer way so I can focus on what you’re telling me? It’s actually hard for me to hear what you want me to hear when you talk to me like that.” Give an example of appropriate behavior. “You can tell me you’re furious with me or even tell me that you hate my guts if you like, but you can’t scream at me and you can’t call me names.” Stay calm. Take deep breaths. Count to ten. Set limits. “If you can’t talk to me in a more respectful tone, I’m getting off the phone.

Austen, I think I got it this time. Let me try to see if this fits. Here are some words for what you are describing. First, you are motivated to clean your bathroom because it does need it. You can even understand your mother’s demand that you clean it, because it is a pit! And it is your responsibility, right?” Austen nods approval. “And you feel a sense of urgency to get your laptop back, too. Right?” Austen nods in the affirmative again. “In fact, you would do almost anything to get your laptop back. Right?” One more time Austen is tracking my logic. “It’s just that you can’t connect cleaning your bathroom and getting the laptop back, because they aren’t related. Right?” “Sure,” Austen says. “It is so obvious that these things aren’t related, and Mother is always trying this stuff. It never works, so why does she bother?” I smile with Austen’s realization. “Actually, this type of approach is used by lots of parents, and it seldom works with teenagers. We parents think that if we withhold a privilege or a favorite item, we’ll get our kids to mind and do things like clean a bathroom. It doesn’t work, and all that happens is a power struggle. But let’s give Mom some slack here and work out your dilemma.” Austen is ready. I explain, “I think the problem is that we need to connect up your motivation to clean your bathroom to your responsibility to clean your bathroom with a call to action to actually clean your bathroom. That will satisfy the urgency you feel to get back your laptop. You’ll get a clean bathroom. You can please your mother. She will be motivated to give you back your laptop even though the laptop has nothing to do with a clean bathroom. This is a win-win solution Austen. You already have motivation, a sense of responsibility, and a feeling of urgency. The only thing that is missing for you is a call to action. That’s the missing piece you keep calling the “not doing it” part. Are you ready to connect the dots?” Austen’s eyes widen, and he smiles. “Yes that’s it!” he says. “I am missing the call to action part.

What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I’ll feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I’m not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpark, and family traditions like my mother’s beef brisket at Passover. These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines—family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. This isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t transcend our inheritance, only that it is our inheritance; whatever else may be gained by giving up meat, this much at least is lost. The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

Teams of prior coworkers were significantly more stable than both teams who had a prior social relationship and teams of strangers.

The dilemma is, as it is often said, correlation does not imply causation.5 The discovery of a predictive relationship between A and B does not mean one causes the other, not even indirectly. No way, nohow.

Happiness can be a confusing concept for Christians. On one hand, if we serve a good God who promises us a full and abundant life, shouldn't we be happy? On the other hand, any careful reading of the life and way of Jesus reveals a life open to suffering and self-denial. The very message of the gospel confronts the shortcuts humans take to happiness and calls those who follow Christ to a new way of life. This apparent tension has commonly become a weapon in the shouting matches between gay-affirming voices and traditional voices. The affirming voices call for the unimpeded opportunity for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) people to experience self-fulfillment through sexual intimacy, relationship, marriage, equal status, and so on. The traditional voices point to a path of self-denial and suffering as the way to live out God's standards. For a gay Christian, when happiness and suffering are pitted against one another, this dilemma can disintegrate into a no-win situation and a source of shame.

THE MIDPOINT OF life represents the moment of maximal conflict between our drive to seek external solutions to our emotional dilemmas and our recognition that, ultimately, they don’t work. In the rough patch we are forced to realize, often against our will, that the life-building activities of youth—job, relationship, children, house—have not taken care of what’s unresolved within. We still yearn—for what

There can be something very disorienting that happens for some new CNM couples who were first monogamous together and were accustomed to being each other’s main source of comfort, support and relief from distress. As the relationship opens, a partner’s actions with other people (even ethical ones that were agreed upon) can become a source of distress and pose an emotional threat. Everything that this person is doing with other people can become a source of intense fear and insecurity for their pre-existing partner, catapulting them into the paradoxical disorganized dilemma of wanting comfort and safety from the very same person who is triggering their threat response.

In the theory of classic disruption, established customers initially reject the inferior, good-enough offer, and hence create a liability for incumbents, for whom allocating resources to the disruptive offer meant going against the feedback of their best customers. This was the tension at the root of the dilemma in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.3 In contrast, established customer relationships are an asset in introducing ecosystem disruption, as they open the door to credibility and ecosystem carryover

in believing that anxiety disorders typically arise from failed efforts to resolve basic existential dilemmas, Dr. W. is, as we will see, running against the grain of modern psychopharmacology (which proffers the evidence of sixty years of drug studies to argue that anxiety and depression are based on “chemical imbalances”), neuroscience (whose emergence has demonstrated not only the brain activity associated with various emotional states but also, in some cases, the specific structural abnormalities associated with mental illness), and temperament studies and molecular genetics (which suggest, rather convincingly, a powerful role for heredity in the determination of one’s baseline level of anxiety and susceptibility to psychiatric illness). Dr. W. doesn’t dispute the findings from any of those modes of inquiry. He believes medication can be an effective treatment for the symptoms of anxiety. But his view, based on thirty years of clinical work with hundreds of anxious patients, is that at the root of almost all clinical anxiety is some kind of existential crisis about what he calls the “ontological givens”—that we will grow old, that we will die, that we will lose people we love, that we will likely endure identity-shaking professional failures and personal humiliations, that we must struggle to find meaning and purpose in our lives, and that we must make trade-offs between personal freedom and emotional security and between our desires and the constraints of our relationships and our communities. In this view, our phobias of rats or snakes or cheese or honey (yes, honey; the actor Richard Burton could not bear to be in a room with honey, even if it was sealed in a jar, even if the jar was closed in a drawer) are displacements of our deeper existential concerns projected onto outward things. Early

They were all unconscious worshippers of the State. Whether the State they worshipped was the Fascist State or the incarnation of quite another dream, they thought of it as something that transcended both its citizens and their lives. Whether it was tyrannical or paternalistic, dictatorial or democratic, it remained to them monolithic, centralized, and remote. This was why the political leaders and my peasants could never understand one another. The politicians oversimplified things, even while they clothed them in philosophical expressions. Their solutions were abstract and far removed from reality; they were schematic halfway measures, which were already out of date. Fifteen years of Fascism had erased the problem of the South from their minds and if now they thought of it again they saw it only as a part of some other difficulty, through the fictitious generalities of party and class and even race...All of them agreed that the State should be something about it, something concretely useful, and beneficent, and miraculous, and they were shocked when I told them that the State, as they conceived it, was the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of anything...We can bridge the abyss only when we succeed in creating a government in which the peasants feel they have some share...Plans laid by a central government, however much good they may do, still leave two hostile Italys on either side of the abyss. The difficulties we were discussing, I explained to them, were far more complex than they realized...First of all, we are faced with two very different civilizations, neither of which can absorb the other...The second aspect of the trouble is economic, the dilemma of poverty. The land has been gradually impoverished: the forests have been cut down, the rivers have been reduced to mountain streams that often run dry, and livestock has become scarce. Instead of cultivating trees and pasture lands there has been an unfortunate attempt to raise wheat in soil that does not favor it. There is no capital, no industry, no savings, no schools; emigration is no longer possible, taxes are unduly heavy, and malaria is everywhere. All this is in large part due to the ill-advised intentions and efforts of the State, a State in which the peasants cannot feel they have a share, and which has brought them only poverty and deserts...We must make ourselves capable of inventing a new form of government, neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State. We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis...The individual is not a separate unit, but a link, a meeting place of relationships of every kind...The name of this way out is autonomy. The State can only be a group of autonomies, an organic federation, The unit or cell through which the peasants can take part in the complex life of the nation must be the autonomous or self-governing rural community. This is the only form of government which can solve in our time the three interdependent aspects of the problem of the South; which can allow the co-existence of two different civilizations, without one lording it over the other or weighing the other down; which can furnish a good chance for escape from poverty...But the autonomy or self-government of the community cannot exist without the autonomy of the factory, the school, and the city, of every form of social life. This is what I learned from a year of life underground.

We all want to be loved and accepted. A longing for unity, for connection, for unconditional love, is a natural desire. Yet as humans we face the existential dilemma of isolation — the condition of being ultimately alone in spite of our many relationships. This aloneness can be frightening at a core level so much so that people often avoid awareness of it. The fundamentalist Christian solves this problem by having the ultimate, most intimate connection — a perfect, unending relationship with God:

I know how lucky I am to have a relationship that is so close to perfect. Am I asking too much for it to be made complete

Trust is the single most important thing in a relationship, be it a marriage or friendship, and I've already betrayed that. I don't expect she will ever forgive me, but you two might still be able to work things out

Chin-notch and dimple dilemma; I have a weird relationship with smiles. They both enhance and distort my appearance at the same time. It is because when I'm Moody, the notch on my chin becomes prominent and I like that. But when I smile hard enough little dimples slightly slash both the cheeks and I like that too. Unfortunately, the smile fades the notch on my chin. And I want to have both the dimbles and the chin notch at the same time, I Cant have that- that complicates my relationship with smiles. Life is kinda like that. Some things require you to sacrifice others to have them.

Let there be light. Gen. 1:3 Let there be enlightenment; let there be understanding. Darkness. Gen. 1:4 Ignorance; lack of enlightenment and understanding. Eden. Gen. 2:8 A delightful place; temporal life. Garden. Gen. 2:8 Metaphorically—a wife; a family. Tree of life in the midst of the garden. Gen. 2:9 Sex; posterity, progeny. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Gen. 2:9 Moral law; the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life. Gen. 2:9 Eternal life. The tree of good and evil. Gen. 2:17 Metaphorically—sexual relationship. Good. Gen. 2:17 Anything perfect. Evil. Gen. 2:17 Anything imperfect; contrary to good; immature. Naked. Gen. 2:25 Exposed; ashamed. Serpent. Gen. 3:1 An enemy; deception. Thorns and thistles. Gen. 3:18 Grievances and difficulties. Sent forth from the garden. Gen. 3:23 A loss of harmony; a lost paradise. God took him away. Gen. 5:24 He died painlessly. He had a heart attack. Sons of God. Gen. 6:2 Good men; the descendants of Seth. My spirit shall not dwell in man forever. Gen. 6:3 I have become weary and impatient. (A scribal note.) The Lord was sorry that He made man. Gen. 6:6 (A scribal note. See Old Testament Light—Lamsa.) I set my bow in the clouds. Gen. 9:13 I set the rainbow in the sky. I have lifted up my hands. Gen. 14:22 I am taking a solemn oath. Thy seed. Gen. 17:7 Your offspring; your teaching. Angels. Gen. 19:1 God’s counsel; spirits; God’s thoughts. Looking behind. Gen. 19:17 Regretting; wasting time. A pillar of salt. Gen. 19:26 Lifeless; stricken dead. As the stars of heaven. Gen. 22:17 Many in number; a great multitude. Went in at the gate. Gen. 23:18 Mature men who sat at the counsel. Hand under thigh. Gen. 24:2 Hand under girdle; a solemn oath. Tender eyed. Gen. 29:17 Attractive eyes. He hath sold us. Gen. 31:15 He has devoured our dowry. Wrestling with an angel. Gen. 32:24 Being suspicious of a pious man. Coat of many colors. Gen. 37:23 A coat with long sleeves meaning learning, honor and a high position. Spilling seed on the ground. Gen. 38:9 Spilling semen on the ground. (An ancient practice of birth control.) No man shall lift up his hand or foot. Gen. 41:44 No man shall do anything without your approval. Put his hand upon thine eyes. Gen. 46:4 Shall close your eyes upon your death bed. Laying on of hands. Gen. 48:14 Blessing and approving a person. His right hand upon the head. Gen. 48:17 A sincere blessing. Unstable as water. Gen. 49:4 Undecided; in a dilemma. The sceptre shall not depart from Judah. Gen. 49:10 There shall always be a king from the lineage of Judah. Washed his garments in wine. Gen. 49:11 He will become an owner of many vineyards. His teeth white with milk. Gen. 49:12 He will have abundant flocks of sheep. His bow abode in strength. Gen. 49:24 He will become a valiant warrior. The stone of Israel. Gen. 49:24 The strong race of Israel. He gathered up his feet. Gen. 49:33 He stretched out his feet—He breathed his last breathe; he died.

Trauma and abuse send signals to your brain that other people are dangerous and can’t be trusted. Parts of your brain identify trusting relationships as not safe. At the same time, you and I need trusting relationships to breathe. We need connection to survive. A paralyzing dilemma.

The urban-rural, human-natural dichotomy blinds us to the deeper unity beneath our own divided perceptions. If we concentrate our attention solely upon the city, seeing in it the ultimate symbol of “man’s” conquest of “nature”, we miss the extent to which the city’s inhabitants continue to rely as much on the nonhuman world as they do on each other … we also wall ourselves off from the broader ecosystems which contain our urban homes. Deep ecology to the contrary, we cannot solve this dilemma by seeking permanent escape from the city in a “wild” nature untouched by human hands, for such an escape requires us to build the same artificial mental wall between nature and un-nature. We fail to see that our own flight from “the city” creates “the wild” as its symbolic opposite and pulls that seemingly most nature of places into our own cultural orbit. We alter it with our presence, and even with the ways we think about it. Just as our own lives continue to be embedded in a web of ‘natural’ relationships, nothing in nature remains untouched by the web of ‘human’ relationships that constitute our common history.

Above all, like much in Biden’s life, his relationship to Obama was built on loyalty. Once you become vice president, Biden said, “you have an obligation to back up whatever he does, unless you have a fundamental moral dilemma with what he’s doing.” He added, “If I ever got to that point, I’d announce I had prostate cancer and I had to leave.” At a Democratic Caucus lunch, after the party had lost the House of Representatives, the then congressman Anthony Weiner criticized Obama for making a deal with Republicans on tax cuts. Biden erupted, saying, “There’s no goddamn way I’m going to stand here and talk about the president like that.

Then there are all those timeless human dilemmas like whom to marry, whether to have children, and what kind of work to pursue. If we had thousands of years in which to live, all those would be far less agonizing, too, since there’d be sufficient time to spend decades trying out each kind of possible existence. Meanwhile, no catalog of our time-related troubles would be complete without mentioning that alarming phenomenon, familiar to anyone older than about thirty, whereby time seems to speed up as you age—steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in their seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes. It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them. And if our relationship to our limited time has always been a difficult one, recent events have brought matters to a head. In 2020, in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, with our normal routines suspended, many people reported feeling that time was disintegrating completely, giving rise to the disorienting impression that their days were somehow simultaneously racing by and dragging on interminably.

Individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style have had to face the dilemma of choosing between themselves or their parents. To submit to their parents leaves them feeling invaded, controlled, and crushed. On the other hand, their loving feelings and the need to maintain the attachment relationship keep them from overtly challenging parents.

The central dilemma in managing the individuality/togetherness force for each person is how to keep the focus on one’s own life and life direction but still stay in open, clear communication with the other significant people in that life.

Whether looking at BTS’s popularity, the financial gains that both the group and company were set to make, or the relationship between the members, there was no reason for them not to recontract. Paradoxically, however, this “relationship” became their dilemma. ______At the end of the day, BTS has seven members. I believed the team couldn’t stay together if even one of us left.

Teams are working on products that will generate new DNA sequences using only natural language instructions. Transformer models are learning the language of biology and chemistry, again discovering relationships and significance in long, complex sequences illegible to the human mind.

A few minutes later, we stumble into his bedroom. He kicks the door shut behind us and shoves me up against it. With a hand fisted in my hair and another on my rear, he kisses me like we’re on the eve of the apocalypse. Keeping time with the pounding of my heart, the floor vibrates with the beat from the music downstairs. I strain against him, trying to get closer. Needing to be closer. Wanting to feel him move through me.` This is what was missing in my other relationship. This unquenchable fire that feels like Rider and I could burn down the whole house with the electricity sparking between us. And tonight, I want to burn.

The resolution of these core dilemmas is about learning to be authentic and at the same time be connected with others. The psychological concept of object constancy refers to the ability of an individual to feel both love and anger toward a person they are in an intimate relationship with. Holding that emotional complexity is an important capacity for healthy adulthood. For a child experiencing attachment and relational failure, it is simply too threatening to stay connected to themself while staying in connection to their caregivers. Yet for an adult, this relational capacity can feel liberating. New possibilities open up as one shifts from child consciousness into embodied adult consciousness, a process we refer to in NARM as disidentification

The information the patient presents to you is distorted through a particular lens; the presentation of the information will change over time as it becomes less distorted; the dilemma may even be about something entirely different that has yet to be uncovered; the patient is sometimes guinning for you to support a particular choice and this will become more clear as your relationships develops; and the patient wants others to make decisions so they don't have to take the responsibility if things don't work out.

If you already know that you don't want to make these changes, but you don't want to lose your partner, I really understand this dilemma. You've tried and tried to make it work, but it just keeps getting worse. In the heat of the moment judgements are hurled, ultimatums are made, insults are exchanged, trust and safety are eroded... it's a painful mess. In extreme cases such as these, it probably means you need to face the fact you and your partner are not compatible anymore.

Instantly, I noticed that our conversation was easy, flirtatious and exciting. It didn’t take very long for us to get to know each other. To start with, I was a little taken aback with both of them being so friendly and talkative. As we talked, I really didn’t know what to call Rita and I stammered some as I attempted to navigate around the social aspects of my dilemma. I didn’t know her last name and “Mrs. Whatjamacallit” didn’t seem appropriate, so I continued using her first name. What seemed awkward to me at first, soon became and sounded acceptable. I also noticed that Connie alternated between calling her mother “Mom” and “Rita.” At first this was strange, but soon I kind of understood the unique relationship between them. For me it seemed different, however I tend to adapt easily and now I was becoming acquainted with a girl who called her mother by her first name. The house was without central heating, but it did have a big cast iron Franklin stove in the living room. Rita looked over to me and asked if I would light the fire. “Guess so,” I replied. I soon found out that lighting the fire encompassed getting and splitting the firewood, and then tending to it. Connie showed me to the front porch where there was a big pile of cordwood, just dumped in one heap. I also noticed that the wind was picking up and was blowing the white stuff onto the porch and covering the woodpile. “Might be a good idea to bring in enough wood to last the night,” I thought aloud. This was going to become a full time job! With Connie’s able help I got a roaring fire going. Rita made sandwiches and poured us all some Coca-Cola, which she topped off with some Canadian Whiskey. Turning the damper down on the fire, I thought to myself that the Franklin stove would never heat this size house, besides the wind was coming in through the cracks around the windows and doors. I knew that the house didn’t have much insulation by how cold the walls were. The windows were single pane, which also didn’t help much, but at least it was shelter. When I mentioned this, Rita said, “Never mind, we’ll all be able to stay warm in bed.” By this time, Connie and I were clowning around and Rita reminded us that she was also there. “I may be momma but I’m not about to freeze, while you kids have all the fun! Besides we only have one bed.” Suddenly the whole scene came into focus. The sandwiches on the kitchen table wouldn’t be our only food. The sandwiches we would have that night would just be the beginning of a feast.

Industrial processes follow a clear, linear, hierarchical logic that is fairly easy to put into words, probably because words follow a similar logic: First this, then that; put this in here, and then out comes that. But the relationship between cows and chickens on this [Polyface] farm...takes the form of a loop rather than a line, and that makes it hard to know where to start, or how to distinguish between causes and effects, subjects and objects. . . Joel would say this is precisely the point, and precisely the distinction between a biological and an industrial system. "In an ecological system like this everything's connected to everything else, so you can't change one thing without changing ten other things. . .This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has proper scale.

Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land. In effect, Joel is farming in time as well as space - in four dimensions rather than three. . .The ides is not to slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species 'fully express their physiological distinctiveness'. He takes advantage of each species' natural proclivities in a way that benefits not only the animal but other species as well.

Mark is a walking dilemma, one of those people who’s hard to figure out. He is an unmarried Christian professional man with no “horrible” problems like drugs, sex, or compulsive addictions. He’s intelligent, athletic, and good-looking. He’s responsible and loves God. Mark is forty-five years old. And he has no friends, safe or otherwise. He is very, very alone. How does that picture come together? On the outside, it doesn’t make sense. A guy with Mark’s qualities should have a rich, active relational life. But when you understand the power of perfectionism, it makes “perfect” sense. For Mark is a perfectionist and has only recently seen the devastating consequences of this trait. Sometimes we make jokes about our perfectionism: “I looked in the mirror and got depressed about being three pounds overweight.” The genuine article, however, can be much more serious. Perfectionism can be a major cause of depression, destructive behaviors, and divorce. What is perfectionism? Simply put, it’s an inability to tolerate faults. Perfectionists have a phobia about imperfections and blemishes in themselves, in other people, and in the world. They spend enormous amounts of time trying to create a perfect world, running in futility from the realities of sin, age, loss, and cellulite. The perfectionist tries to live in the land of ideals. He sees life the way “it should be.” People should treat each other right. I should be a productive, successful person. Fairness and equality should rule. Then he sees the huge chasm between the land of ideals and the land of the real. For example, he cannot live up to his expectations of himself. Or he is let down by someone important to him. And he has great difficulty accepting where he lives—the land of the real. So he tries to change his permanent address to ideal-land again.

Psychological rigidity, the idea has a psychoanalytic origin, is the attitude of subjects who on all questions give simple responses, summaries that are entrenched without any nuance, and they are little disposed to recognize discordant facts. This rigidity is not at all a psychological force, but a mask under which an extremely divided personality is hidden: it is a reaction formation...The subjects have a profound division within themselves and a repressed aggressivity toward their parents. The subjects avoid all ambiguity and proceed with dichotomies (obedient-authority, cleanliness-dirtiness, virtue-vice, masculinity-femininity dilemmas). Psychological rigidity is effectively born from relationships with parents and extends to moral ideas. The families of these children are, in general, authoritative and frustrating. The child creates a double image of his parents: one is beneficent and appears first, the other is aggressive and is deeply hidden ('good mother and bad mother')...The social aspect of the phenomenon is that these families are socially marginal (for example, the nouveaux riches, Italian or Irish minorities in American towns) and because of this they are authoritarian...The 'rigid' child often has racial prejudices that arise from what he projects onto 'exterior' minorities. What he cannot accept in his own personality. (For instance, the myths of black sexuality in the U.S.A. and myths of the battle of the sexes; everyone puts the faults on others that he does not want to recognize in himself)... Apparently liberal subjects can have an absolute, abstract manner: for example, they declare that all men are identical, from every point of view, and refuse to see differences in historical situations. What predicts psychological rigidity is less the adoption of this or that theory (except racist theories which, founded on a myth, are only justifiable as an explanation of psychological mechanisms); it is more the manner of adopting, justifying, and holding these opinions...The entire world is ambiguous, but what is important is the manner in which one deals with this ambiguity. Psychological maturity is shown in accepting to see ambiguity and to 'interiorize' conflict.

She kept reminding me she was at a wedding, which didn’t really help my emotional state, if you know what I mean.

information comes at a person with ADHD. The ADHD brain has few filters on it; often, everything enters at once, and in a big jumble. This provides some interesting dilemmas in a world that values hierarchy, but it is also an opportunity.

Developing the courage to think negatively allows us to look at ourselves as we really are. There is a remarkable consistency in people’s coping styles across the many diseases we have considered: the repression of anger, the denial of vulnerability, the “compensatory hyperindependence.” No one chooses these traits deliberately or develops them consciously. Negative thinking helps us to understand just what the conditions were in our lives and how these traits were shaped by our perceptions of our environment. Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and autoimmune disease. The purpose is not to blame parents or previous generations or spouses but to enable us to discard beliefs that have proved dangerous to our health. “The power of negative thinking” requires the removal of rose-coloured glasses. Not blame of others but owning responsibility for one’s relationships is the key. It is no small matter to ask people with newly diagnosed illness to begin to examine their relationships as a way of understanding their disease. For people unused to expressing their feelings and unaccustomed to recognizing their emotional needs, it is extemely challenging to find the confidence and the words to approach their loved ones both compassionately and assertively. The difficulty is all the greater at the point when they have become more vulnerable and more dependent than ever on others for support. There is no easy answer to this dilemma but leaving it unresolved will continue to create ongoing sources of stress that will, in turn, generate more illness. No matter what the patient may attempt to do for himself, the psychological load he carries cannot be eased without a clear-headed, compassionate appraisal of the most important relationships in his life. “Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,” wrote Hans Selye. The power of negative thinking requires the strength to accept that we are not as strong as we would like to believe. Our insistently strong self-image was generated to hide a weakness — the relative weakness of the child. Our fragility is nothing to be ashamed of. A person can be strong and still need help, can be powerful in some areas of life and helpless and confused in others. We cannot do all that we thought we could. As many people with illness realize, sometimes too late, the attempt to live up to a self-image of strength and invulnerability generated stress and disrupted their internal harmony.

Mahabharata is about the household, about relationships, about others. It is essentially about a property dispute. Arjuna’s dilemma begins when he realizes that the enemy is family and he fears the impact of killing family on society as a whole. Krishna

The best advice I got came from a colleague I didn’t know very well—or at least, not well enough to know that she once had a boyfriend who had a drug problem. When she told me about her ex, I instantly recognized the relationship she described, the intensity of his affection eventually trumped by the upheaval of his constant drama. The way she put it seemed so simple: “I realized I had to choose his life or mine.” I understood that decision—it was exactly how I felt after I bailed Graham out of Rikers. But there was one question that still troubled me, more as a moral dilemma most of us don’t want to face: What happens to these addicts after the sober, sane people in their lives leave them? We all know the answer: Many of them don’t get better. We lock them up, or they overdose and die.

In her hurry, though, she’d forgotten to grab her pajamas, which was a dilemma. She could either go out and get them and return to the bathroom to change, or she could go out there and put them on. If Sean didn’t like it, he didn’t have to watch. After leaving the bathroom, she turned off the overhead light in the bedroom, but it didn’t do much good. The night was clear, the moon was bright, and she knew she was all too visible when she undid her jeans and shimmied them down over her hips. “What the hell are you doing?” “Changing into my pajamas.” “You always do that in the bathroom.” His voice was low and rough, but she noticed he didn’t look away. “I forgot them, and there’s no point in going back in there.” She kicked off the jeans and was going to pull on the shorts before changing shirts, but then she remembered his stupid answers to the stupid questions in that game and changed her mind. “The point is that you don’t do it in front of me.” “Oh, did you forget? Being watched turns me on.” And she pulled her T-shirt over her head. She had to bite down on a surprised yelp once she was free of it because suddenly Sean was standing in front of her, wearing nothing but blue boxer briefs and a scowl. “You said I had no imagination.” “And having no imagination is so much worse than your best friend’s family thinking you’re an exhibitionist.” “And we’re not ever going to talk about the other thing you said. Ever.” He was crowding her personal space, so she put her hands on his chest to push him back, but he caught her wrists. Standing there with her palms pressed against his naked skin, she could feel his heart beating at a quickened pace that matched her own and she knew she had two choices. Walk away or end up in bed with him. She leaned her body a little closer and splayed her fingers across his chest. “Which thing aren’t we talking about? The fast-food-joint bathroom or—” “Don’t push me too far, Emma. It’s been a long time for me.” “How long?” “Too damn long.” He lifted her hands from his chest, but didn’t let go of her wrists. “And I never even got to scope out the dating situation here before you showed up at my door with this half-assed scheme.” “And since we… You haven’t…” “The last thing I need is to get caught cheating on a woman I can’t tell anybody I’m not really in a relationship with.” His gaze dropped from her face to her lacy white bra and he sighed. “You’re killing me.” “Lying awake on the couch every night, wondering what it would be like to slide into bed with you has been killing me for two weeks.” “Yeah.” He let go of her wrists and slid his hands up the back of her neck and into her hair. “I’ve thought about that, too. A lot. Pretty much constantly, actually.

Words such as receptive, feminine, yielding or mother can be misleading as we tend to understand them as poles with opposites. However, they hint at what lies beyond them, so we need to consider them in a different way if we are to grasp what the 2nd Siddhi really means. This is something that can only be grasped intuitively. Thus when the One externalises itself as a manifestation in form, it has not created a duality, but a trinity. Every duality is really a relationship, and every relationship is really a three — there is a man, a woman and instantly there is also a couple — the relationship itself. In Divine mathematics, the number two is always an illusion — it cannot logically exist. If you can say anything at all about the number two you might say it is a bridge — a dynamic process that is instantaneously transmuted before it is even born. These are concepts that cannot be approached with ordinary logic. Just like the quantum particles in physics that avoid our definition because they appear to be linked to our very perceptual apparatus, oneness cannot be comprehended, only lived. Enlightenment is not an experience. This is a sentence to meditate upon like a Zen koan. If you see oneness as an experience to be attained or that may one day happen to you, then you are caught within that straight line between two points. The third thing is transcendence. It does not occur to you — rather it negates you. Ironically, transcendence does not take you away from life, as its name might suggest — it places you right in the heart of life, where you have always been. It unifies all opposites, ends all riddles, leaves all mysteries just as they are and brings a sense of trust that cannot be described. One cannot even really use a word like trust to describe the Siddhi of Unity because trust suggests duality again — that there is somehow a truster and a trustee. This is the wonderful dilemma of the siddhic state.

Nietzsche's feelings of being dirty and his need for self-purification, combined with seeing humans as a 'polluted river', mentioned before, is not surprising, in light of the hypothesized sexual abuse from childhood. Given this, his lack of trust in people 'accepting and eating a meal in whose cuisine one has no confidence', his fear of getting hurt again in close relationships is understandable. Nietzsche compared 'close proximity to a person' to touching a good etching with one's fingers, and by so doing, dirtying and losing its beauty 'A human being's soul is likewise worn down by continual touching'. It seemed to him that one always loses in being in too intimate a relationship with women and friends 'sometimes one loses the pearl of his life in the process'. This trauma-ridden person was only defending himself. Adopting the role of a hermit, was one defense, but there were also others mentioned by him, such as using roles (dresses), disguise (masks) and disappearance. He put a chair at the door to avoid intrusions and played 'ghost' not responding , hiding, and making people afraid of him. He felt and played dead as if he was already posthumous. Still being human (all too human), Nietzsche needed love too. Hence his dilemma, which he called 'from the land of cannibals' 'In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowds consumes him, Now choose'.

People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said when we met. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes their primary mission. “The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale went on. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back-and-forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. . . . They needed a force that was more adherent to the interests of capital. . . . Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be the strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. . . . It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morph into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.” The almost exclusive reliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into failed states. The “broken windows” policy, adopted by many cities, argues that disorder produces crime. It criminalizes minor infractions, upending decades of research showing that social dislocation leads to crime. It creates an environment where the poor are constantly harassed, fined, and arrested for nonsubstantive activities.

CHAPTER 15 STIGMA AND POLITICS We are left with a dilemma. Mental health—sanity—does not ensure good leadership; in fact, it often entails the reverse. Mental illness can produce great leaders, but if the illness is too severe, or treated with the wrong drugs, it produces failure or, sometimes, evil. The relationship between mental illness and leadership turns out to be quite complex, but it certainly isn’t consistent with the common assumption that sanity is good, and insanity bad.

So, you charmed her into your bed and you think that is enough? No Sir, your big dilemma is, what are you willing to do to keep her there?

Love, then, creates a dilemma for Americans. In some ways, love is the quintessential expression of individuality and freedom. At the same time, it offers intimacy, mutuality, and sharing. [...] The sharing and commitment in a love relationship can seem, for some, to swallow up the individual, making her (more often than him) lose sight of her own interests, opinions, and desires. Paradoxically, since love is supposed to be a spontaneous choice by free individuals, someone who has "lost" herself cannot really love, or cannot contribute to a real love relationship. Losing a sense of one's self may also lead to being exploited, or even abandoned, by the person one loves.

Determining the proper relationship between universal morality and historically particular ethics poses a particularly acute problem in the postmodern era. The question that has remained with us since the end of World War II is how to overcome the paralysis of Auschwitz – how to acknowledge the necessary deferral of reciprocity without condoning genocide. If we hold history’s institutions to the touchstone of the moral model, they will always be found wanting, yet this historical experience tells us that if we do not so hold them, anything is possible. The fact that accusations of Nazism (or “fascism”) continue to be made today – notably against Israel itself – is a sign that the moral dilemma hos not yet been resolved. But unlike metaphysical thought, originary thinking takes the Holocaust as sign not of the need to construct a social model that will resolve this dilemma, but of the inapproapriateness of confronting it directly. Making the world a better place not only does not require but is in fact incompatible with a prior image of the world made good.

This dilemma of wanting to be loved and known in all of our ugliness can lead us down some painful roads. We may live in constant anxiety, for example, hiding our ugliness as best we can and hoping someone else will overcome it. We can become angry people who reject other persons first before we, ourselves, feel the pain of rejection. Or we can enter a relationship but attach an invisible note to every act of kindness: “Okay, I’ve done this for you, now I’ve earned your love; now please accept me fully and love me.” But since this ultimately doesn’t work in a relationship, the relationship is drained over time.

In his attempt to discover own self, the client typically uses the relationship to explore, to examine the various aspects of his own experience, to recognize and face up to the deep contradictions which he often discovers. He learns how much of his behavior, even how much of the feeling he experiences, is not real, is not something which flows from the genuine reactions of his organism but is a facade, a front, behind which he has been hiding. He discovers how much of his life is guided by what he thinks he should be, not by what he is. Often he discovers that he exists only in response to the demands of others, that he seems to have no self of his own, that he is only trying to think, and feel, and behave in the way that others believe he ought to think, and feel and behave. In this connection I have been astonished to find how accurately the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, pictured the dilemma of the individual more than a century ago, with keen psychological insight. He points out that the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose "to be another than himself." On the other hand "to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair," and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man. As I read some of his writings I almost feel that he must have listened in on the statements made by our clients as they search and explore for the reality of self--often a painful and troubling search. This exploration becomes even more disturbing when they find themselves involved in removing the false faces which they had not known were false face. They begin to engage in the frightening task of exploring the turbulent and sometimes violent feelings within themselves. To remove a mask which you had thought was part of your real self can be a deeply disturbing experience, yet when there is freedom to think and feel and be, the individual moves toward such a goal.

A pastor from another church approached me and said, “Well, you got to remember one thing: Don’t become friends with those you minister to. Staff are employees and you just want to keep a professional relationship.” This left me in a dilemma.

If, as children, we had to deny our true thoughts or feelings to be safe, as adults we are likely to continue to deny what’s true for us. Telling the truth feels very unsafe, a threat to survival. What a dilemma. Denying ourselves feels safer, but it obscures our sense of who we are. The safe route, however, violates an emotional boundary. What’s the way out of the dilemma? If boundary development was severely harmed when you were a child, therapy may be the most efficient route. When we don’t work ourselves free of the issues that got started when we were children, we are destined to relive them again and again. “Children who suffer trauma to core self and identity …,” writes Jane Middleton-Moz, “work toward resolution of that trauma and completion of development in adult life through repetition of the struggle with authority figures, in intimate relationships, through their own children or in therapy.”3

You want to see my eagerness flooding my eyes, (Moved) you wanted me to cry my heart out, and then, by the power of your presence again in my life, every granule of pain turns miraculously into a sparkling diamond of love.

So you admit that you have changed!! I am fond of husbands who possess genuine love for their wives, and it doesn't change but to be sweeter, fiercer in, an unharmful, passionate way, and stronger with pure affection. Find me one who never changes but for much better versions of himself for a lifetime.

Our fights, quarrels, and debates blinded me that I forgot how much she means to me. She means the world, the whole world with its varieties and diversities.

Relationships end, and whether you're the one leaving or the one being left behind, the one thing that you can't run away from are the memories. They're part of you; they deserve better than to disappear.

Technology should amplify the best of us, open new pathways for creativity and cooperation, work with the human grain of our lives and most precious relationships. It should make us happier and healthier, the ultimate complement to human endeavor and life well lived—but always on our terms, democratically decided, publicly debated, with benefits widely distributed.

The chicken-or-the-egg dilemma comes into play when we think about the investment and leap that people in relationships have to make before the building process ever begins.