Don't Be Reactive Quotes

Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don’t have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

We need this help from the outside because we don't know how to to do this for ourselves. We start with a deep deficit—a chasm really—when it comes to understanding and being tolerant of ourselves, and that's even before we go forth to do battle with the rest of the world. As soon as someone judges, criticizes, dismisses, or ignores, the cycle of pain and reactivity ramps up, compounded by shame, remorse, and rejection. The act of validation, simply saying, 'I can see things from your perspective,' can short-circuit that emotional detour.

Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean. Antoine de Saint-Exupery A

The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don't yield immediate solutions.

...The life of the parents is the only thing that makes good children. Parents should be very patient and ‘saintlike’ to their children. They should truly love their children. And the children will share this love! For the bad attitude of the children, says father Porphyrios, the ones who are usually responsible for it are their parents themselves. The parents don’t help their children by lecturing them and repeating to them ‘advices’, or by making them obeying strict rules in order to impose discipline. If the parents do not become ‘saints’ and truly love their children and if they don’t struggle for it, then they make a huge mistake. With their wrong and/or negative attitude the parents convey to their children their negative feelings. Then their children become reactive and insecure not only to their home, but to the society as well...

With reactive boundaries, you fight the friend who constantly bugs you. With proactive boundaries, you decide you don’t need that kind of a friend.

If you don't make a conscious effort to visualize, who you are and what you want to become in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape your journey by default. Your silence makes you reactive vs. proactive. God will bring people in your life that can take you on many different journeys that will bring about different outcomes to your life mission. However, if you are not proactive and define your dreams you will never know where “you” need to be and who needs to be with you to fulfill what God is asking you to do. Your life is your own. You must define your dreams, not live someone else’s vision of a good life. What is it that God is asking you to do with the talents and hobbies you enjoy? What were you blessed with a desire for? A good life is one spent in the service of helping others. Find a life partner that will help you reach God’s highest potential—service to humanity, service to his Kingdom, service to building others up. Also, begin any choice with the end in mind. This means to begin each day with a clear vision of your desired direction. It is not enough to live a passive life of religious devotion. God asked you to do more than worship. He has called you to serve, not to be a servant to other people’s dreams. You and only you know where your heart must travel. God brings you storms in life to wake you up. Don’t see it as his disappointment, but as his parental love for you. Life was not meant to stay the same. If someone truly loves you they will never take you away from God’s plan, they will only magnify it.

An insecure mind is highly reactive. Don’t act until you have thought over it.

Your inner self knows something about what’s happening, and your reactivity is letting you know that you don’t like what’s going on, that you feel uncomfortable or threatened, or that you’re in danger.

No!" Kagan exclaims. “Every behavior has more than one cause. Don’t ever forget that! For every child who’s slow to warm up, yes, there will be statistically more high-reactives, but you can be slow to warm up because of how you spent the first three and a half years of your life! When writers and journalists talk, they want to see a one-to-one relationship—one behavior, one cause. But it’s really important that you see, for behaviors like slow-to-warm-up, shyness, impulsivity, there are many routes to that.

The environmental movement up till now has necessarily been reactive. We have been clear about what we don’t like. But we also need to say what we would like. We need to show where hope lies. Ecological restoration is a work of hope.

People don’t need to have a head in order to give someone else a headache.

Don't be carried away by the current of the situation. Focus on the essentials, take action on the best alternative are the ways of shifting from reactive to proactive mindset.

You have a choice to not add to the negativity. Remember, two negatives don't make a right.

...Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there's hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that's been dead for over a hundred years. And present-day Communism clings to this outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn't have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it's changing all the time, and it's changed immeasurably. Communism apparently are still asserting that they are not changing, they're following the same Marxist principles. We don't have any principles. It's an advantage.

Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with—why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us collapse into major depression (melancholia)? In his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud began with what the two have in common. In both cases, he felt, there is the loss of a love object. (In Freudian terms, such an “object” is usually a person, but can also be a goal or an ideal.) In Freud’s formulation, in every loving relationship there is ambivalence, mixed feelings—elements of hatred as well as love. In the case of a small, reactive depression—mourning—you are able to deal with those mixed feelings in a healthy manner: you lose, you grieve, and then you recover. In the case of a major melancholic depression, you have become obsessed with the ambivalence—the simultaneity, the irreconcilable nature of the intense love alongside the intense hatred. Melancholia—a major depression—Freud theorized, is the internal conflict generated by this ambivalence. This can begin to explain the intensity of grief experienced in a major depression. If you are obsessed with the intensely mixed feelings, you grieve doubly after a loss—for your loss of the loved individual and for the loss of any chance now to ever resolve the difficulties. “If only I had said the things I needed to, if only we could have worked things out”—for all of time, you have lost the chance to purge yourself of the ambivalence. For the rest of your life, you will be reaching for the door to let you into a place of pure, unsullied love, and you can never reach that door. It also explains the intensity of the guilt often experienced in major depression. If you truly harbored intense anger toward the person along with love, in the aftermath of your loss there must be some facet of you that is celebrating, alongside the grieving. “He’s gone; that’s terrible but…thank god, I can finally live, I can finally grow up, no more of this or that.” Inevitably, a metaphorical instant later, there must come a paralyzing belief that you have become a horrible monster to feel any sense of relief or pleasure at a time like this. Incapacitating guilt. This theory also explains the tendency of major depressives in such circumstances to, oddly, begin to take on some of the traits of the lost loved/hated one—and not just any traits, but invariably the ones that the survivor found most irritating. Psychodynamically, this is wonderfully logical. By taking on a trait, you are being loyal to your lost, beloved opponent. By picking an irritating trait, you are still trying to convince the world you were right to be irritated—you see how you hate it when I do it; can you imagine what it was like to have to put up with that for years? And by picking a trait that, most of all, you find irritating, you are not only still trying to score points in your argument with the departed, but you are punishing yourself for arguing as well. Out of the Freudian school of thought has come one of the more apt descriptions of depression—“aggression turned inward.” Suddenly the loss of pleasure, the psychomotor retardation, the impulse to suicide all make sense. As do the elevated glucocorticoid levels. This does not describe someone too lethargic to function; it is more like the actual state of a patient in depression, exhausted from the most draining emotional conflict of his or her life—one going on entirely within. If that doesn’t count as psychologically stressful, I don’t know what does.

Reactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the “social weather.” When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

You may wonder why all children don’t make up wonderfully positive role-selves—why so many people are acting out roles of failure, anger, mental disturbance, emotional volatility, or other forms of misery. One answer is that not every child has the inner resources to be successful and self-controlled in interactions with others. Some children’s genetics and neurology propel them into impulsive reactivity instead of constructive action. Another reason negative role-selves arise is that it’s common for emotionally immature parents to subconsciously use different children in the family to express unresolved aspects of their own role-self and healing fantasies. For instance, one child may be idealized and indulged as the perfect child, while another is tagged as incompetent, always screwing up and needing help.

I don’t know what I’ll do until I know what you’ll do. I’m proactive with my preemptive reactive strategy.


Inspired action comes from the guidance of Spirit, not ego. When in doubt, don’t. Inspired action is responsive, not reactive.

I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will. This

At the end of the day we’re all reactive personalities. We just don’t know it until we meet the right catalyst.

Be proactive, not reactive—don't let someone else define your day in an email or phone call.

I could see where I’d mistaken drama and conflict for life, which meant years of living reactively instead of generatively, a life I let be determined by circumstances and the choices of others. We like to think life happens to us, but pretty much everything in your life is there because you wanted it, even if unconsciously. Results, I have learned, don’t lie.

I don't think we should be unafraid not to discuss the gay dialectic as an energy and the homophobic constraints that endorse its marginalisation as a functionally reactive discourse.

Watch, become alert, observe, and go on dropping all the reactive patterns in you. Each moment try to respond to the reality—not according to the ready-made idea in you but according to the reality as it is there outside. Respond to the reality! Respond with your total consciousness but not with your mind. And then when you respond spontaneously and you don’t react, action is born. Action is beautiful, reaction is ugly. Only a man of awareness acts, the man of unawareness reacts. Action liberates. Reaction goes on creating the same chains, goes on making them thicker and harder and stronger. Live a life of response and not of reaction.

Successful people do work hard, but they also think before they act. They are proactive, not just reactive. Most people mentally have a sign on their desk that reads, “Don’t just sit there—do something!” The best advice I ever received was to revise the sign to read, “Don’t just do something—sit there!

I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself – to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don't we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth? One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You're slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody’s identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don’t take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that’s all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.

At one seminar where I was speaking on the concept of proactivity, a man came up and said, “Stephen, I like what you’re saying. But every situation is so different. Look at my marriage. I’m really worried. My wife and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other we used to have. I guess I just don’t love her anymore and she doesn’t love me. What can I do?” “The feeling isn’t there anymore?” I asked. “That’s right,” he reaffirmed. “And we have three children we’re really concerned about. What do you suggest?” “Love her,” I replied. “I told you, the feeling just isn’t there anymore.” “Love her.” “You don’t understand. The feeling of love just isn’t there.” “Then love her. If the feeling isn’t there, that’s a good reason to love her.” “But how do you love when you don’t love?” “My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?” *** In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling.

practice. Mindful Acknowledgment with Children I see this scene often: a child comes to a parent visibly upset. The parent wants to make the child feel better, so he skips right to trying to fix her problem. It usually sounds like, “Why don’t we…,” or “You can just instead.” A solution is offered and the problem is solved…right? Yet with this response, parents have just missed a potent opportunity to connect. They’ve skipped over the powerful step of acknowledgment—recognizing what’s happening for the child in that moment. Acknowledgment shows that we are seeing and accepting the truth or existence of something, such as the child’s hurt feelings.

Let’s now look at the four basic types of EI parents (Gibson 2015): Emotional parents are dominated by feelings and can become extremely reactive and overwhelmed by anything that surprises or upsets them. Their moods are highly unstable, and they can be frighteningly volatile. Small things can be like the end of the world, and they tend to see others as either saviors or abandoners, depending on whether their wishes are being met. Driven parents are super goal-achieving and constantly busy. They are constantly moving forward, focused on improvements, and trying to perfect everything, including other people. They run their families like deadline projects but have little sensitivity to their children’s emotional needs. Passive parents are the nicer parents, letting their mate be the bad guy. They appear to enjoy their children but lack deeper empathy and won’t step in to protect them. While they seem more loving, they will acquiesce to the more dominant parent, even to the point of overlooking abuse and neglect. Rejecting parents aren’t interested in relationships. They avoid interaction and expect the family to center around their needs, not their kids. They don’t tolerate other people’s needs and want to be left alone to do their own thing. There is little engagement, and they can become furious and even abusive if things don’t go their way.

the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds. Life is a pounding surf that wears away our rock-solid certainty. The surf always wins. Slowly but surely. Eventually. It may be best to ride the waves rather than resist them. What are your one or two biggest obstacles to staying Christian? What are those roadblocks you keep running into? What are those issues that won’t go away and make you wonder why you keep on believing at all? These are questions I asked on a survey I gave on my blog in the summer of 2013. Nothing fancy. I just asked some questions and waited to see what would happen. In the days to come, I was overwhelmed with comments and e-mails from readers, many anonymous, with bracingly honest answers often expressed through the tears of relentless and unnerving personal suffering. I didn’t do a statistical analysis (who has the time, plus I don’t know how), but the responses fell into five categories.         1.        The Bible portrays God as violent, reactive, vengeful, bloodthirsty, immoral, mean, and petty.         2.        The Bible and science collide on too many things to think that the Bible has anything to say to us today about the big questions of life.         3.        In the face of injustice and heinous suffering in the world, God seems disinterested or perhaps unable to do anything about it.         4.        In our ever-shrinking world, it is very difficult to hold on to any notion that Christianity is the only path to God.         5.        Christians treat each other so badly and in such harmful ways that it calls into question the validity of Christianity—or even whether God exists. These five categories struck me as exactly right—at least, they match up with my experience. And I’d bet good money they resonate with a lot of us. All five categories have one big thing in common: “Faith in God no longer makes sense to me.” Understanding, correct thinking, knowing what you believe—these were once true of their faith, but no longer are. Because life happened. A faith that promises to provide firm answers and relieve our doubt is a faith that will not hold up to the challenges and tragedies of life. Only deep trust can hold up.

Still, Kagan’s decades-long series of discoveries mark a dramatic breakthrough in our understanding of these personality styles—including the value judgments we make. Extroverts are sometimes credited with being “pro-social”—meaning caring about others—and introverts disparaged as people who don’t like people. But the reactions of the infants in Kagan’s tests had nothing to do with people. These babies were shouting (or not shouting) over Q-tips. They were pumping their limbs (or staying calm) in response to popping balloons. The high-reactive babies were not misanthropes in the making; they were simply sensitive to their environments. Indeed, the sensitivity of these children’s nervous systems seems to be linked not only to noticing scary things, but to noticing in general.

Proactive people show you what they love, what they want, what they purpose, and what they stand for. These people are very different from those who are known by what they hate, what they don’t like, what they stand against, and what they will not do. While reactive victims are primarily known by their “against” stances, proactive people do not demand rights; they live them. Power is not something you demand or deserve; it is something you express. The ultimate expression of power is love; it is the ability not to express power, but to restrain it. Proactive people are able to “love others as themselves.” They have mutual respect. They are able to “die to self” and not “return evil for evil.” They have gotten past the reactive stance of the law and are able to love and not react.

What scientists haven’t realized until recently is that these risk factors have an upside. In other words, the sensitivities and the strengths are a package deal. High-reactive kids who enjoy good parenting, child care, and a stable home environment tend to have fewer emotional problems and more social skills than their lower-reactive peers, studies show. Often they’re exceedingly empathic, caring, and cooperative. They work well with others. They are kind, conscientious, and easily disturbed by cruelty, injustice, and irresponsibility. They’re successful at the things that matter to them. They don’t necessarily turn into class presidents or stars of the school play, Belsky told me, though this can happen, too: “For some it’s becoming the leader of their class. For others it takes the form of doing well academically or being well-liked.

by raising what appears before you. If you can’t even serve what is put in front of you, how are you going to change the world? If you are getting so upset about conditions in the world that you’re edgy with everyone around you, you’re not helping anyone. If you can’t create harmony in your own household, what right do you have to complain that countries are shooting missiles at each other? You have to live a life that, if everyone lived it, there would be peace. If you can’t do that, you are part of the problem, not the solution. It’s all about letting go of yourself. The world is going to come in, and it’s going to hit what’s left of your samskaras. What you feel going on inside when that happens is reactive energy. Don’t ever act based on that. You will just be polluting the environment with your inner blockages. No good can come from that.

The Journal called the memo the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” because in it, Garlinghouse complains, “We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything—to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.… “I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. “I hate peanut butter. We all should.

On the one hand, according to the theory of gene-environment interaction, people who inherit certain traits tend to seek out life experiences that reinforce those characteristics. The most low-reactive kids, for example, court danger from the time they’re toddlers, so that by the time they grow up they don’t bat an eye at grown-up-sized risks. They “climb a few fences, become desensitized, and climb up on the roof,” the late psychologist David Lykken once explained in an Atlantic article. “They’ll have all sorts of experiences that other kids won’t. Chuck Yeager (the first pilot to break the sound barrier) could step down from the belly of the bomber into the rocketship and push the button not because he was born with that difference between him and me, but because for the previous thirty years his temperament impelled him to work his way up from climbing trees through increasing degrees of danger and excitement.

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we’re about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator’s eye. Yet the audience expects not only that we’ll stay put, but that we’ll act relaxed and assured. This conflict between biology and protocol is one reason that speechmaking can be so fraught. It’s also why exhortations to imagine the audience in the nude don’t help nervous speakers; naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.

This is an important tool that is unique to networked products. Traditional products that lack networks often struggle with this, because they rely on spammy emails, discounts, and push notifications to entice users back. This usually doesn’t work, and company-sent communications rank among the lowest clickthrough rate messages. Networked products, on the other hand, have the unique capability to reactivate these users by enlisting active users to bring them back. Even if you don’t open the app on a given day, other users in the network may interact with you—commenting or liking your past content, or sending you a message. Getting an email notification that says your boss just shared a folder with you is a lot more compelling than a marketing message. A notification that a close friend just joined an app you tried a month ago is a lot more engaging than an announcement about new features. And the more dense the network is around a churned user, the more likely they are to receive this type of interaction.

Public speaking phobia has many causes, including early childhood setbacks, that have to do with our unique personal histories, not inborn temperament. In fact, public speaking may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator's eye. Yet the audience expects not only that we'll stay put, but that we'll act relaxed and assured. This conflict between biology and protocol is one reason that speechmaking can be so fraught. It's also why exhortations to imagine the audience in the nude don't help nervous speakers; naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.

Scientists have known for a while that high-reactive temperaments come with risk factors. These kids are especially vulnerable to challenges like marital tension, a parent’s death, or abuse. They’re more likely than their peers to react to these events with depression, anxiety, and shyness. Indeed, about a quarter of Kagan’s high-reactive kids suffer from some degree of the condition known as “social anxiety disorder,” a chronic and disabling form of shyness. What scientists haven’t realized until recently is that these risk factors have an upside. In other words, the sensitivities and the strengths are a package deal. High-reactive kids who enjoy good parenting, child care, and a stable home environment tend to have fewer emotional problems and more social skills than their lower-reactive peers, studies show. Often they’re exceedingly empathic, caring, and cooperative. They work well with others. They are kind, conscientious, and easily disturbed by cruelty, injustice, and irresponsibility. They’re successful at the things that matter to them. They don’t necessarily turn into class presidents or stars of the school play, Belsky told me, though this can happen, too: “For some it’s becoming the leader of their class. For others it takes the form of doing well academically or being well-liked.

When people have a low vibration they are more reactive and less able to observe and think properly. Trauma, sadness, injustice, apathy and anger, all these things bring a person down to a state from where many never get out. Then because these people can't control themselves, they are constantly reacting to the high energies they feel - pulling them down. They attack the wrong target and fear what they need the most. They literally become antagonistic to higher vibrations. It's in their nature and they can't control that. Neither do they want. They will rationalize "disbelief" and prove you wrong to make you confused before they change, even when they promise to change, because they don't want to. And why would they if they can confuse you? Confusion is a low vibration scheme, and as you go lower in this vibration of lies, you feel more lost and confused about yourself. It then happens that you are forced to abandon any group that vibrates at a low frequency because they insist on making you confused. Certainty - which is not the same as arrogance but is instead the knowing of something to be true -, is a high frequency level. And the creatures of the darkness attack precisely that certainty, by making you feel ashamed of what you know, by calling you a narcissist. You find them in all religions without exceptions. Very few people know what the light is because they have never seen their real face in a mirror when the light is on.

Why, he asked, do all of our policing efforts have to be so reactive, so negative, and so after the fact? What if, instead of just focusing on catching criminals—and serving up ever harsher punishments—after they committed the crime, the police devoted significant resources and effort to eliminating criminal behavior before it happens? To quote Tony Blair, what if they could be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime?3 Out of these questions came the novel idea for Positive Tickets, a program whereby police, instead of focusing on catching young people perpetrating crimes, would focus on catching youth doing something good—something as simple as throwing litter away in a bin rather than on the ground, wearing a helmet while riding their bike, skateboarding in the designated area, or getting to school on time—and would give them a ticket for positive behavior. The ticket, of course, wouldn’t carry a fine like a parking ticket but instead would be redeemable for some kind of small reward, like free entry to the movies or to an event at a local youth center—wholesome activities that also had the bonus of keeping the young people off the streets and out of trouble. So how well did Richmond’s unconventional effort to reimagine policing work? Amazingly well, as it turned out. It took some time, but they invested in the approach as a long-term strategy, and after a decade the Positive Tickets system had reduced recidivism from 60 percent to 8 percent. You might not think of a police department as a place where you would expect to see Essentialism at work, but in fact Ward’s system of Positive Tickets is a lesson in the practice of effortless execution. The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in. The Nonessentialist operates under the false logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground. The way of the Essentialist is different. Instead of trying to accomplish it all—and all at once—and flaring out, the Essentialist starts small and celebrates progress. Instead of going for the big, flashy wins that don’t really matter, the Essentialist pursues small and simple wins in areas that are essential.

All these indifferent passions, or passions born of indifference, all these negative passions, culminate in hatred. A strange expression: `I've got the hate' [J'ai la haine]. No object. It is like `I'm demonstrating', but for whom, for what? `I take responsibility' [J'assume], but for what? Nothing in particular. One perhaps takes responsibility precisely for the nothing. One demonstrates for or against the nothing -- how are we to know? This is the fate of all these intransitive verbs. The graffiti said: `I exist', `I live at this particular place'. This was stated with a kind of exultation, yet at the same time it said: `There is no meaning to my life'. Similarly, `I've got the hate' says at the same time: `This hate I have has no object'; `There's no meaning to it'. Hatred is doubtless something which does indeed outlive any definable object, and feeds on the disappearance of that object. Who are we to take against today? There, precisely, is the object: the absent other of hatred. `Having' hatred is like a sort of potential of -- negative and reactive -- energy, but energy all the same. These are, indeed, the only passions we have today: hatred, disgust, allergy, aversion, rejection and disaffection. We no longer know what we want, but we know what we don't want. In its pure expression of rejection, it is a non-negotiable, irremediable passion. Yet there is in it something like an invitation to the absent other to offer himself as an object for that hatred. The dream of hatred is to give rise to a heartfelt enmity, which is scarcely available at all in our world now, as all conflicts are immediately contained. Over against the hatred born of rivalry and conflict there is a hatred born of accumulated indifference which can suddenly crystallize in an extreme physical outburst. We are not speaking of class hatred now, which, paradoxically, remained a bourgeois passion. That had a target, and was the driving force behind historical action. This hatred is externalized only in episodes of `acting-out'. It does not give rise to historical violence, but to a virulence born of disaffection with politics and history. In this sense, it is the characteristic passion not of the end of history but of a history without end, a history which is a dead-end, since there has been no resolution of all the problems it posed. It is possible that beyond the end, in those reaches where things turn around, there is room for an indeterminate passion, where what remains of energy also turns around, like time, into a negative passion.

Thus polyvictimization or complex trauma are "developmentally adverse interpersonal traumas" (Ford, 2005) because they place the victim at risk not only for recurrent stress and psychophysiological arousal (e.g., PTSD, other anxiety disorders, depression) but also for interruptions and breakdowns in healthy psychobiological, psychological, and social development. Complex trauma not only involves shock, fear, terror, or powerlessness (either short or long term) but also, more fundamentally, constitutes a violation of the immature self and the challenge to the development of a positive and secure self, as major psychic energy is directed toward survival and defense rather than toward learning and personal development (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). Moreover, it may influence the brain's very development, structure, and functioning in both the short and long term (Lanius et al., 2010; Schore, 2009). Complex trauma often forces the child victim to substitute automatic survival tactics for adaptive self-regulation, starting at the most basic level of physical reactions (e.g., intense states of hyperarousal/agitation or hypoarousal/immobility) and behavioral (e.g., aggressive or passive/avoidant responses) that can become so automatic and habitual that the child's emotional and cognitive development are derailed or distorted. What is more, self-integrity is profoundly shaken, as the child victim incorporates the "lessons of abuse" into a view of him or herself as bad, inadequate, disgusting, contaminated and deserving of mistreatment and neglect. Such misattributions and related schema about self and others are some of the most common and robust cognitive and assumptive consequences of chronic childhood abuse (as well as other forms of interpersonal trauma) and are especially debilitating to healthy development and relationships (Cole & Putnam, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1992). Because the violation occurs in an interpersonal context that carries profound significance for personal development, relationships become suspect and a source of threat and fear rather than of safety and nurturance. In vulnerable children, complex trauma causes compromised attachment security, self-integrity and ultimately self-regulation. Thus it constitutes a threat not only to physical but also to psychological survival - to the development of the self and the capacity to regulate emotions (Arnold & Fisch, 2011). For example, emotional abuse by an adult caregiver that involves systematic disparagement, blame and shame of a child ("You worthless piece of s-t"; "You shouldn't have been born"; "You are the source of all of my problems"; "I should have aborted you"; "If you don't like what I tell you, you can go hang yourself") but does not involve sexual or physical violation or life threat is nevertheless psychologically damaging. Such bullying and antipathy on the part of a primary caregiver or other family members, in addition to maltreatment and role reversals that are found in many dysfunctional families, lead to severe psychobiological dysregulation and reactivity (Teicher, Samson, Polcari, & McGreenery, 2006).

In your body, the gradually accumulating burden of reactive experiences is called allostatic load, which increases inflammation, weakens your immune system, and wears on your cardiovascular system. In your brain, allostatic load causes neurons to atrophy in the prefrontal cortex, the center of top-down executive control; in the hippocampus, the center of learning and memory; and in other regions. It impairs myelination, the insulating of neural fibers to speed along their signals, which can weaken the connectivity between different regions of your brain, so they don’t work together as well as they should.

We won’t be able to eliminate the drama in our lives or escape all the crazies. But we can actually learn to live responsively instead of reactively, being positive when others are negative.

Secondly, after you stop thinking about the problem consciously, the subconscious will continue thinking about it 24/7. Your super-fast creative mind will process millions of thoughts and give you ideas while you are on a walk, taking a shower or sleeping. The subconscious mind is responsible for most original and successful ideas that you create. Once the subconscious generates an idea for you, write it down no matter where you are and what time of the day it is. Finally, think about your task occasionally for 2 to 5 minutes. During this time you will not only generate fresh ideas but will also reactivate your creative mind and make it think intensively while you are not consciously thinking about the problem. The Think and Rest technique will help you generate successful business ideas in 100% of cases. If after using this technique a great idea didn’t come to you, it means that either not enough time has passed or that you don’t have enough raw materials to create an idea from and need to do more research. Think and Rest is a strategy that most effectively activates the thinking process in the brain. To become as effective at generating successful business ideas as possible, use Think and Rest consciously. The best innovators and thinkers in the world use this strategy daily.

Then love her. If the feeling isn’t there, that’s a good reason to love her.” “But how do you love when you don’t love?” “My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?” *** In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling. They’re driven by feelings. Hollywood has generally scripted us to believe that we are not responsible, that we are a product of our feelings. But the Hollywood script does not describe the reality. If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so. Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return. If you are a parent, look at the love you have for the children you sacrificed for. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured. CIRCLE OF CONCERN/CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE Another excellent way to become more self-aware regarding our own degree of proactivity is to look at where we focus our time and energy.

When a reactive person is complimented, their mental balloon goes along with that breeze: they are happy, suddenly their self-worth is higher. But, by the same token, when someone insults them, their mental balloon bobs back in the other direction. Now, they are worthless. You could spend your whole life in this back and forth.

Visionary leadership is not reactive. It refuses to arrogantly offer the right solution or give the right answer. Rather, leading with vision requires that we relate to people. Dan Allender writes, Leadership is not about problems and decisions; it is a profoundly relational enterprise that seeks to motivate people toward a vision that will require significant change and risk on everyone’s part. Decisions are simply the doors that leaders, as well as followers, walk through to get to the land where redemption can be found.3 Leadership hinges on relationship, and that requires us to risk. And though I’m convinced that visionary, relational leadership is a bedrock Christian posture, we all have a disturbing bent toward relational immaturity. I see how easily I become cynical, dismissive, judgmental, and reactive. I see how quickly I’m tempted to blast back at the person who sends a critical e-mail, or judge the person who doesn’t make progress fast enough, or get impatient with those I manage who don’t accomplish exactly what I think they should. Our journey toward dealing compassionately with difficult people doesn’t simply require us to learn a bit more about others. It also requires us to become better acquainted with ourselves.

Sniff, swill, sip 329 words Leading whisky expert Charles MacLean on the underrated art of downing a good Scotch. USE ALL YOUR SENSES We all love a splash of golden liquor now and then, but the fine art of appreciating whisky requires a heightening of the senses. 'Nosing' whisky, a technique employed by blenders, is called sensory evaluation or analeptic assessment. Prior to sipping, examine its colour and 'tears', which are the reams left behind on the glass after you swirl it. Even our sense of hearing can help us judge the whisky; a full bottle should open with a happy little pluck of the cap. APPRECIATE A GOOD MALT Appreciation and enjoyment are two dimensions of downing a stiff one. Identify how you like your whisky (with ice, soda or water) and stick with it. Getting sloshed on blended whisky is all very good, but you will need single malt and an understanding of three simple things to truly cherish your drink. A squat glass with a bulb at the bottom releases the full burst of its aroma when swilled. A narrow rim is an added advantage. Instead of topping the drink with ice, which dilutes the aroma, go for water. NIBBLE, DON'T GOBBLE Small bites pair best with your whisky. It excites the palate minimally, letting you detect the characteristics of the whisky through contrast. If you're not a big fan of food and whisky pairing, skip it. OLD IS GOLD While old whiskies are not necessarily better, it's a known fact that most of the finer whiskies are well-aged. I would consider whiskies that are anywhere between 18 and 50 years as old, but it also depends on the age of the cask. If the cask is reactive, it will dominate the flavours of the whisky within ten years of the ageing process. If you leave the spirit in the cask for much longer, the flavour of the whisky will be overpowered by the wood, lending it a distinct edge. Maclean was in Delhi to conduct the Singleton Sensorial experience.

Nobody grins more on their first day on the dev team than someone from QA. Contrary to what people believe, QA people don’t sit around playing games all day. Although they’re the first people to see new titles, one can’t describe their day-to-day routine as fun. It takes meticulous effort to write and verify bug reports. Developers fix bugs at their own pace, after which it becomes QA’s responsibility to test and verify whether the proper adjustment has been made. Some bugs are trivial or are duplicates of others; some are fiendishly difficult to solve and take months or even years to address. Other entries aren’t even bugs and are dubbed “working as intended.” When a problem is discovered by QA, it has to be verified by senior QA staff members. Josh Kurtz described nightmarish experiences he had isolating a bug that occurred whenever a player attacked a monster in Diablo II’s expansion. To eliminate the possibility that a weapon was the culprit of the bug, Josh had to attack a dummy monster using every weapon in the game, a process that took hours. Tasks like these might be split among QA people or sometimes they fell to just one unfortunate soul to sort out. After every weapon was checked, Josh reported the results. The programmers or designers would change something, and Josh would then have to retest every weapon and report results again. The developers would change something else, and Josh would need to test everything again to make sure the bug hadn’t reactivated. And again. After doing something like this repetitively for hours, for days, for weeks, and sometimes for months, QA drudgery feels less like being in a computer game company and more like a psychological experiment. These entry-level positions are minimum-wage jobs, but people endure the experience just for a chance at getting a development position, becoming a QA lead, or attaining some other non-developer position. But everyone’s goal is the same: escape from QA.

Now if I were sitting at that funeral we visualized earlier, and one of my children was about to speak, I would want his life to represent the victory of teaching, training, and disciplining with love over a period of years rather than the battle scars of quick fix skirmishes. I would want his heart and mind to be filled with the pleasant memories of deep, meaningful times together. I would want him to remember me as a loving father who shared the fun and the pain of growing up. I would want him to remember the times he came to me with his problems and concerns. I would want to have listened and loved and helped. I would want him to know I wasn’t perfect, but that I had tried with everything I had. And that, perhaps more than anybody in the world, I loved him. The reason I would want those things is because, deep down, I value my children. I love them, I want to help them. I value my role as their father. But I don’t always see those values. I get caught up in the “thick of thin things.” What matters most gets buried under layers of pressing problems, immediate concerns, and outward behaviors. I become reactive. And the way I interact with my children every day often bears little resemblance to the way I deeply feel about them. Because I am self-aware, because I have imagination and conscience, I can examine my deepest values. I can realize that the script I’m living is not in harmony with those values, that my life is not the product of my own proactive design, but the result of the first creation I have deferred to circumstances and other people. And I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past. I can become my own first creator.

In these instances, take a step back and say to yourself, Whoa, what’s going on with me? Why am I so triggered (angry, enraged, freaked out, frozen, numb, shut down, or charged up)? Ah, that’s it; I’m in an amygdala hijack. If you can have this type of self-awareness and learn how to act differently in these situations, you can reveal and eventually liberate yourself from this reactive loop. You will give yourself the option of choosing a new and better behavior. Don’t doubt you can do this; students as early as third grade are identifying hijacks to avert conflict.

Think about your health, work, and relationships. Where do you find the biggest gap between your desired identity and your behavior? If you were to define your best-self identity in each of the three domains, what words would you use? List a champion proof for each best-self identity to know you’ve stepped into that identity every day. What does your ideal day look like? What does your ideal morning routine consist of? How can you restructure your days to better manage your energy and time? Remember to be creative before reactive. What is a massive goal you can set to force yourself to take massive action in your life? Don’t be afraid to dream. Commit before you’re ready. What is one thing in your life you can 80/20? Zero in on the 20% of effort that would create 80% of the results. Could you benefit from the power of single-tasking? Consider creating a timesheet to record how much time you spend on each task everyday and notice how much task-switching is costing you. What is one stat in your life you can begin to monitor to help you stay on track and feel encouraged as you see your progress? Implement a weekly review. Note your big wins, progress on your Top 3 objectives, what went well, and what didn’t. Look ahead to your appointments for next week, review your Top 3 objectives, and mark time on your calendar to do them. Which of the antifragility concepts most resonated with you? Is there a situation where you can apply that concept in your daily life?

Aside from evidence for proactive violence among contemporary hunter-gatherers, two thorny facts don’t entirely square with the view that we stopped fighting ever since we became hunter-gatherers. The first fact is muscle. The average adult man today is 12 to 15 percent heavier than the average adult woman, but women have much higher percentages of body fat masking underlying differences in muscle mass. Whole-body scans show that males average 61 percent more muscle mass then females, with most of that difference in the upper body.30 Men’s extra brawn, moreover, is added during puberty, when testosterone levels shoot up, accelerating muscle growth in the arms, shoulders, and neck.31 In this regard, human men resemble male kangaroos, whose upper bodies also enlarge during adolescence to help them fight.32 Enhanced upper-body muscularity in male humans might also have been selected for hunting, but we cannot rule out aggression. The second fact is literally staring us in the face. Consider the faces of assorted males in the genus Homo lined up for you in figure 16. Note that until about 100,000 years ago, even in some of the earliest Homo sapiens, males tend to have massive, heavily built faces and menacingly large browridges. The earliest H. sapiens males have smaller, less robust faces than Neanderthals and other non-modern humans, but truly lightly built, “feminized” faces don’t appear until less than 100,000 years ago.33 It is intriguing to hypothesize that these big faces reflect higher levels of testosterone during adolescence. In males today, elevated testosterone contributes to not only higher libidos, more impulsivity, and more reactive aggression but also bigger browridges and larger faces.34 Another molecule that possibly affects facial masculinization is the neurotransmitter serotonin, which reduces aggression; less masculinized faces are associated with higher levels of serotonin.35

When we don’t further contribute to our mental reactivity by simply becoming aware of it, like a fire deprived of fuel, sooner or later the flames decrease, the fire dies down and eventually goes out.

Yet nonreactive adult humans can excel at purposeful, planned forms of hostility. This kind of proactive aggression is characterized by predetermined goals, premeditated plans of action, attention to the target, and lack of emotional arousal. Chimpanzees sometimes engage in proactive aggression, but humans have taken planned, intentional forms of fighting to new heights such as ambushing, kidnapping, premeditated homicide, and, of course, war. Arguably, hunting and combative sports like boxing are also forms of proactive aggression. And, importantly, hunting and other forms of planned aggression are utterly different psychologically from reactive aggression. Violent criminals, ruthless dictators, torturers, and other proactive aggressors can simultaneously be loving spouses and parents, reliable friends, and patriotic fellow citizens who remain utterly calm and pleasant in situations that would send a chimpanzee or a toddler into a rage. They also don’t need to be as physically powerful.

Blood glucose instability is a huge problem that affects the moods of millions of people. The brain accounts for only about 2 percent of body weight, but requires 25 percent of all blood pumped by the heart (up to 50 percent in kids). Therefore, low blood sugar hits the brain hard, causing depression, anxiety, and lassitude. If you often become uncomfortably hungry, you’ve got a serious problem and should solve it. Eat high-protein, nutrient-dense meals, and snack enough to keep your blood sugar up, but not with insulin-stimulating sweets or starches. Remember that hunger kills brain cells, just like getting drunk. Be careful of caffeine, which causes blood sugar swings, and never crash diet. Food sensitivities are common reactions that are not classic food allergies, so most conventional allergists underestimate the damage they do. They play a major role in mood disruption, much more frequently than most people realize. They cause chemical reactions in the body that destabilize blood sugar and wreak havoc upon hormonal and neurotransmitter balance. This can trigger depression, anxiety, impaired concentration, insomnia, and hyperactivity. The most common sensitivities, unfortunately, are to the foods people most often overconsume: wheat, milk, eggs, corn, soy, and peanuts. The average American gets about 75 percent of her calories from just 10 favorite foodstuffs, and this narrow range of eating disrupts the digestive process and causes abnormal reactions. If a particular food doesn’t agree with you and commonly causes heartburn, gas, bloating, water weight gain, a craving for more, or a burst of nervous energy, you’re probably reactive to it. There are several good books on the subject, and there are many labs that test for sensitivities. Ask a chiropractor, naturopath, or doctor of integrative medicine about them. Don’t expect much help from a conventional allergist. Exercise and Mood Dozens of studies indicate that exercise is often as effective for depression as medication, partly because it increases production of stimulating hormones, such as norepinephrine, and also because it increases oxygen flow to the brain. Exercise can, in addition, help relieve and prevent anxiety, creating a so-called tranquilizer effect that persists for about 4 hours after exercising. Exercise also decreases the biological stress response, which dampens the automatic fear reaction. It is also uniquely effective at causing secretion of Nerve Growth Factor, one of the limited number of substances that cause brain cells to grow. Another benefit of exercise is that it increases endorphin output by about 500 percent and decreases the incidence of major and minor illnesses. For mood, the ideal amount is 30 to 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise daily. Studies show that exercising less than 30 minutes or more than 1 hour decreases mood benefits.

We can help patients find peace, but maybe a different kind than they imagined they'd find when they started treatment. ... I know that therapy won't make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I'll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don't perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself- to let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are so that you aren't trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life.

Evidence suggests that people with irritable bowels have bodies that are more physically reactive to stress. I recently came across an article in the medical journal Gut that explained the circular relationship between cognition (your conscious thought) and physiological correlates (what your body does in response to that thought): people who are less anxious tend to have minds that don’t overreact to stress and bodies that don’t overreact to stress when their minds experience it, while clinically anxious people tend to have sensitive minds in sensitive bodies—small amounts of stress set them to worrying, and small amounts of worrying set their bodies to malfunctioning. People with nervous stomachs are also more likely than people with settled stomachs to complain of headaches, palpitations, shortness of breath, and general fatigue. Some evidence suggests that people with irritable bowel syndrome have greater sensitivity to pain, are more likely to complain about minor ailments like colds, and are more likely to consider themselves sick than other people.

In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky details how reactivity and your temperament are also strong predictors of how stressed-out you are likely to be. Our sensitive high reactor can be compared to a neurotic “Type A” personality. Any little thing sets them off, and once they’re going it can be hours before they settle back down. It’s easy for a high reactor to stay soaked in stress hormones for hours on end, set off by an ever-compounding series of morning traffic, meetings, bosses, co-workers, and traffic on the way home. These people set themselves off, yes, but it’s in their nature to do so. Being effectively numb to the same pressures, low-reactors can handle much more without flinching. The low reactor isn’t a psychopath, as they experience emotions and react to life-events as anyone would, but the effects of stress aren’t pronounced. It takes an extraordinary event to provoke a response, and they’re much better at turning all the coping systems off after the fact. You’d be absolutely right if you guessed that these neural and psychological differences translate to different physical outcomes. Stress is stress. Your brain is the master controller, and it doesn’t care if the threat is a third-degree burn or you clenching your teeth for 16 straight hours because you don’t know how to relax. To the high reactor, intense exercise becomes just another log on the bonfire, whereas a low reactor may not even notice.

It is natural to take it personally when someone disconnects from vou. especiallv if they don't tell vou why. At the same time, it is also important to realize that people's decision to disconnect often has nothing to do with you. It is often entirely about them.One of the most common things I have witnessed, is a need to sever connection that is rooted in the personal individuation process. That is, someone has gone through their life as a people pleaser, as a co-dependent, as someone whose experience of the self is confusingly intertwined with others, and they need to push someone away in order to finallv feel separate. They need to claim their stake as an individuated entity, but they don't know how to do it non-reactively. So they abruptly terminate a personal connection. in order to establish a new way of being.Quite often, they do this with someone who is peripheral to their primary co-dependencies,because they are not ready to live without those.They pick a friend or a secondary figure, as their first stepping out. In these situations, you are merely a relational symbology, a figure that had to go in order for them to finally feel like a boundaried, empowered person. This is not to say that it won't hurt, but it is to say that it was never about vou.

If you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you. As Marcus Aurelius advised, "Choose not to be harmed- and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed- and you haven't been." The more ways your identity can be threatened by casual daily interactions, the more valuable it will be to cultivate the Stoic (and Buddhist, and CBT) ability to not be emotionally reactive, to not let others control your mind and your cortisol levels... words don't cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat.

Codependents have poor communication skills. They’re so preoccupied or emotionally reactive that often they don’t really listen. The other person’s words get filtered through layers of fear and low self-esteem.

I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

Patience in your life. Remember that we don’t have to fill up every moment with entertainment, distractions, and activity. Life gets better when we make space and time to absorb each moment rather than rushing to the next thing. When we allow some spacious, unstructured time around activities, we enjoy them as a family even more. Downtime is a good thing.

know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are.

Most parenting books don’t tell you that all their good advice goes out the window when your stress response kicks in—as in, you literally can’t access the areas of the brain where your good new skills are stored. That’s why this book will show you how to quiet your stress response (the reactive, raging banshee inside) and teach you how to communicate with your child effectively (so you stop triggering so much resistance).

Practice: Beginner’s Mind on a Walk Start by seeing the activity of walking with fresh eyes, as if you don’t know what to expect, as if you haven’t done it thousands of times already. Really look at the path, the trees or concrete, the buildings and landscape. Try to see the details that you might not normally notice. Notice the textures, tastes, smells, and appearance of the world around you. Pay close attention, as if you don’t already know where your walk will take you.

Mindful Acknowledgment with Children I see this scene often: a child comes to a parent visibly upset. The parent wants to make the child feel better, so he skips right to trying to fix her problem. It usually sounds like, “Why don’t we…,” or “You can just instead.” A solution is offered and the problem is solved…right? Yet with this response, parents have just missed a potent opportunity to connect. They’ve skipped over the powerful step of acknowledgment—recognizing what’s happening for the child in that moment. Acknowledgment shows that we are seeing and accepting the truth or existence of something, such as the child’s hurt feelings. Acknowledging can be magic with our children. They have a great need for us to recognize their thoughts and feelings—to really hear and see them. As parents, we often want to skip over this step and solve their problems. Instead, when we say what we see, our children feel seen and heard, which makes nearly every situation better.

Practice: Sitting Mindfulness Meditation Find a quiet time and place. Sit upright but relaxed on a chair or cushion. Be comfortable! You can even meditate in a recliner. Either cup your hands, letting your thumbs touch, or simply rest them in whatever way is comfortable. Set a timer so you don’t have to worry about the time. Close your eyes fully or leave them at half-mast. Bring your attention to your breath and your body. Let your mind be spacious and your heart be kind and soft. Feel your breath at your belly or your nose. Let your breath be natural. Notice each in-breath and each out-breath. Say to yourself, “breathing in” as you breathe in and “breathing out” as you breathe out. Expect your mind to wander right away. That’s normal! The goal is not to stop your thoughts but to train your attention. The goal is to spend more time in the present moment and less time lost in distraction. Label your thoughts “thinking” if you want, then return your attention to your breath. Do this again, and again, and again, and again. Each time you discover that your mind has wandered is an opportunity to do a “rep” and build that mindfulness muscle. Even if you think you are doing this badly, it is still working. Meditation thrives on practice and a kind approach. If you do this simple practice every day, you will gradually become more grounded and aware.

I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself — to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

What does an I-message look like in action? “I told you to put away your toys now!” becomes: “With your toys all over the floor, I feel annoyed because I step on them and it hurts my feet.” “Don’t kick me—that’s a terrible way to act!” becomes: “Ouch! That really hurts my shins!” “Stop that yelling!” becomes: “When you yell, I can’t hear anything and I feel grumpy and frustrated.

If you don’t do , you won’t get .” Instead, think of it as, “First we do [responsibility], then we do [fun thing].

We can use our past- and future-selves to pull us out of the moment and remind us when we’re watching the ticker, looking at our lives through that lens on extreme zoom. When we view these upticks and downticks under the magnification of that in-the-moment zoom lens, our emotional responses are, similarly, amplified. Like the flat tire in the rain, we are capable of treating things that will have little effect on our long-term happiness as having significant impact. Our decision-making becomes reactive, focused on off-loading negative emotions or sustaining positive emotions from the latest change in the status quo. We can see how this can result in self-serving bias: fielding outcomes to off-load the negative emotions we feel in the moment from a bad outcome by blaming them on luck and sustaining the positive emotions from good outcomes by taking credit for them. The decisions driven by the emotions of the moment can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, degrading the quality of the bets we make, increasing the chances of bad outcomes, and making things worse.

They don’t learn how to account for others’ feelings because they’re so focused on their own suffering (from the punishment). The motivation for children is to simply avoid punishment.

When you keep interrupting, I feel annoyed because I can’t hear what Daddy’s saying.” If she continues to interrupt, then her need is clearly very strong. So then I reflectively listen, guessing at her underlying needs: “Seems like you’re worried I’m going to keep talking and forget you, and you have something really important to tell me.” When she affirms this, I suggest a solution that meets both of our needs: “Okay, this won’t take long, so as soon as I’m done talking to Daddy, I’ll give you my attention. You can even gently put your hand on my shoulder so I don’t forget.” With this, she is satisfied and both of our needs are met.

Senses recklessly transport our minds away from where we want them to be. Don’t tease your own senses. Don’t set yourself up to fail. A monk doesn’t spend time in a strip club. We want to minimize the mind’s reactive tendencies, and the easiest way to do that is for the intellect to proactively steer the senses away from stimuli that could make the mind react in ways that are hard to control. It’s up to the intellect to know when you’re vulnerable and to tighten the reins, just as a charioteer does when going through a field of tasty grass.

DBT posits that borderline patients possess a genetic/biological vulnerability to emotional overreactivity. This view hypothesizes that the limbic system, the part of the brain most closely associated with emotional responses, is hyperactive in BPD. The second contributing factor, according to DBT practitioners, is an invalidating environment: that is, others dismiss, contradict, or reject the developing individual’s emotions. Confronted with such interactions, the individual is unable to trust others or her own reactions. Emotions are uncontrolled and volatile. To calm these erratic emotions, DBT emphasizes mindfulness, the process of paying attention to what is happening at the moment, without extreme emotional reactivity, judgment, or invalidation. In the initial stages of treatment, DBT focuses on a hierarchical system of targets, confronting first the most serious and then later the easier behaviors to change. The highest priority addressed immediately is the threat of suicide and self-injuring behaviors. The second-highest target is to eliminate behaviors that interfere with therapy, such as missed appointments or not completing homework assignments. The third priority is to address behaviors that interfere with a healthy quality of life, such as disruptive compulsions, promiscuity, or criminal conduct; among these, easier changes are targeted first. The fourth priority is to focus on increasing behavioral skills.

They Have Low Stress Tolerance Emotionally immature people don’t deal with stress well. Their responses are reactive and stereotyped. Instead of assessing the situation and anticipating the future, they use coping mechanisms that deny, distort, or replace reality (Vaillant 2000). They have trouble admitting mistakes and instead discount the facts and blame others. Regulating emotions is difficult for them, and they often overreact. Once they get upset, it’s hard for them to calm down, and they expect other people to soothe them by doing what they want. They often seek comfort in intoxicants or medication

If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.

But when we instead tell our children how their unacceptable behavior makes us feel, the language turns into an “I” message: “I feel discouraged when I see this big mess.” “I don’t want to race right now because I’m tired.” “I feel stressed when we have to hurry.” Kids receive an I-message as a statement of fact about what the parent is feeling, so it causes less resistance. How do you

...therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

To sum up, we lose the ability to transport copper because we don’t have access to the ceruloplasmin taxi, which feeds copper to the cells and to the mitochondria. If ceruloplasmin cannot get copper to the cells and their mitochondrial power grids, the result is a general breakdown of ATP production. And if enough copper is not available, we cannot regulate oxygen metabolism and cytochrome c oxidase is not going to be able to activate oxygen to create energy. If that happens, then we’re not going to be able to regulate iron metabolism. The end result is that our mitochondria are not able to make energy, and the body is not going to be able to make heme and iron sulfur clusters, which are created as a part of the mitochondrial actions. Given that iron is a terminal destination in the mitochondria, we’re going to have a serious problem because this iron will build up inside the ferritin storage proteins, both inside the mitochondria, as well as inside the cells. Then we’re going to lose the ability to regulate the reactive oxidative stress that takes place. And we’re not going to have enough antioxidant enzymes to break down the oxidative stress that’s building. This is why both copper and ceruloplasmin are so important for proper energy production that does not result in iron buildup and oxidative stress, particularly in Complex IV, but in all mitochondrial complexes of the ETC.

A great marker is turning out to be something called C-reactive protein (CRP).

helps enormously to save the fun stuff for after they’ve taken care of their responsibilities. In my home, this means that screen time comes after my girls put away their backpacks, feed the cats, empty the dishwasher, and set the table. It could be that dessert happens after your child clears and wipes the table. Whatever it is for you, your parenting life will be easier if you establish a culture of responsibilities before privileges. Please don’t use this approach as a threat, as in: “If you don’t do , you won’t get .” Instead, think of it as, “First we do [responsibility], then we do [fun thing].

Building a Rock-Solid Routine GREAT WORK BEFORE EVERYTHING ELSE Do your most meaningful creative work at the beginning of your day, and leave “reactive work”—like responding to e-mail or other messages—for later. JUMP-START YOUR CREATIVITY Establish “associative triggers”—such as listening to the same music or arranging your desk in a certain way—that tell your mind it’s time to get down to work. FEEL THE FREQUENCY Commit to working on your project at consistent intervals—ideally every day—to build creative muscle and momentum over time. PULSE AND PAUSE Move rhythmically between spending and renewing your energy by working in ninety-minute bursts and then taking a break. GET LONELY Make a point of spending some time alone each day. It’s a way to observe unproductive habits and thought processes, and to calm your mind. DON’T WAIT FOR MOODS Show up, whether you feel inspired or not.

Brené Brown wrote in Daring Greatly (2012, p. 177), “We can’t give people what we don’t have. Who we are matters immeasurably more than what we know or who we want to be.

Exercise: Win-Win Problem Solving with a Positive Problem A great place to start bringing win-win into your life is with a positive problem, such as where to go on your next vacation or what to do on the weekend. Here’s how to do it: Decide on a positive decision you need to make that you want everyone’s input on. Invite your children into a conversation with you, and have a big piece of paper ready. State the problem simply (“We have both days open next weekend and we’d like to decide what to do”). Identify your needs (for example, “I’m going to need to take care of my body with some exercise”). Ask each person what he or she will be needing (“What do you think you will be needing next weekend?”). Write everything down. Be sure to translate their solutions into underlying needs. Ask the question, “What will that do for you/me/us?” to suss out the underlying needs. Brainstorm ideas, writing every single idea down. Do not evaluate yet! When all the ideas are out there, use the , , ? system to move quickly through the list of ideas. Practice staying grounded, listening reflectively, and using your I-messages as needed. Decide upon the plan that meets everyone’s needs. Write out your plan, so that your child can see her ideas on paper. Finally, don’t forget to check in! After your weekend is over, come back to your notes and have a conversation about how it went. Did everyone get his or her needs met? This step shows that you take your child’s input seriously and that her needs matter to you—making her more likely to cooperate voluntarily in the future, when the situation may be more emotionally heated.

Beginning Anew: A Tool for Bringing Closeness out of Conflict No matter how skillful and grounded we are, there will still be conflicts and problems in our families. The tools of mindfulness meditation, loving-kindness, reflective listening, I-messages, and more will greatly reduce the number and severity of those conflicts, but we will still have them. Conflicts can, however, bring us even closer together if we use these moments as opportunities to be real and vulnerable, and to come together to repair the damage done. On a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, I learned the Beginning Anew framework for repairing a relationship—including a relationship with a child. It teaches us to look deeply and honestly at ourselves and our past actions, speech, and thoughts. We take this moment as a fresh beginning for ourselves and in our relationships with others. Beginning Anew has three parts: offering appreciation, sharing regrets, and expressing hurts and difficulties. You can do this in person, or write a letter of Beginning Anew if your child reads. Part 1: Offering appreciation. This is an opportunity to shine light on the other’s strengths and contributions, and to encourage the growth of his or her positive qualities. You may mention specific instances when the other person said or did something that you appreciated. This first step shows that you see the wonderful things about this person. Part 2: Sharing regrets. This is your chance to mention any unskillful actions, speech, or thoughts that you feel bad about and haven’t yet had an opportunity to apologize for. For example, you might say, “I’m sorry that I said you were selfish. I was wrong to do that. I realize how my comment hurt you, and I shouldn’t have spoken in that way.” Part 3: Expressing hurts and difficulties. Now you share how you felt hurt by something the other person did or said. Use your I-messages here. Don’t attack or blame. Speak or write about your hurts in a calm way, never in an exaggerated, reproachful, accusatory, or desperate manner

STRAWBERRY RHUBARB JAM Makes 3 pints 4 cups of chopped strawberries (about 2 pounds) 2 cups of chopped rhubarb (about 1 pound) 4 cups sugar 3 tablespoons powdered pectin 1 lemon, zested and juiced Prepare a boiling water bath canner and 3 pint jars. Place the chopped berries and rhubarb in a large, non-reactive pot. Whisk the pectin into the sugar and stir it into the berries. Let it sit for 10-15 minutes, until the sugar has begun to dissolve. Place the pot on the stove and bring to a boil. Cook jam over high heat, stirring regularly for 20-25 minutes, until it takes on a thick, syrup-y consistency. Add the lemon zest and juice and stir well. Check for set by taking the temperature of the cooking jam (it should set around 220F) or by watching how the droplets fall off the spoon. Remember that it will thicken as it cools, so don’t cook it so long that it achieves your desired consistency while still hot. Remove the jam from the heat and ladle it into the prepared jars, leaving 1/2 inch. Wipe the rims, apply the lids and rings and process them in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. When the time is up, remove the jars and set them on a folded kitchen towel to cool. When the jars have cooled enough that you can comfortably handle them, check the seals. Sealed jars can be stored at room temperature for up to a year. Any unsealed jars should be refrigerated and used promptly.

Reactivation is often a quicker, simpler, and more effective approach to increasing revenue than attracting new customers. Your old customers already know and Trust you, and they’re aware of the value you provide. You have their information—you don’t have to find them. Your cost of customer acquisition (a component of Allowable Acquisition Cost) is low—all you have to do is contact them and present an attractive offer.

Many people make lists as a way to keep organized. If you don’t keep a list, you are most likely a very reactive person. Lists help you stay focused on high priorities and highly productive matters. Keeping a list will double your productivity right away.

Yet another pitfall of language is the illusion that our thinking can easily be corrected if it doesn’t “make sense.” The “cognitive” part of cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on changing such “dysfunctional thinking.” This is a top-down approach to change in which the therapist challenges or “reframes” negative cognitions, as in “Let’s compare your feelings that you are to blame for your rape with the actual facts of the matter” or “Let’s compare your terror of driving with the statistics about road safety today.” I’m reminded of the distraught woman who once came to our clinic asking for help with her two-month-old because the baby was “so selfish.” Would she have benefited from a fact sheet on child development or an explanation of the concept of altruism? Such information would be unlikely to help her until she gained access to the frightened, abandoned parts of herself—the parts expressed by her terror of dependence. There is no question traumatized people have irrational thoughts: “I was to blame for being so sexy.” “The other guys weren’t afraid—they’re real men.” “I should have known better than to walk down that street.” It’s best to treat those thoughts as cognitive flashbacks—you don’t argue with them any more than you would argue with someone who keeps having visual flashbacks of a terrible accident. They are residues of traumatic incidents: thoughts they were thinking when, or shortly after, the traumas occurred that are reactivated under stressful conditions.