Labeling Someone Quotes

But these words people threw around - humans, monsters, heroes, villains - to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics. Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.

But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

I feel the same way about all my friends. To me, the exact relationship between me and someone else doesn't matter much.But people want to label everything...so I guess I seem indifferent in that way. ---Yasu

Labels aren't big enough for people. And once you try to categorize someone, you stop looking for who they actually are.

For someone so determined to be labeled a monster, he’s incredibly invested in my pleasure and consent.

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?

I think labeling someone's intelligence with a letter grade isn't a sign of their ability.

When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that’s bullying. When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the government shutdown, that’s bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification. That’s nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.

Because I don’t like to label what I feel for you as love. This”—he points between us—“is much more potent and twisted than mere love. If loving someone means letting them go and wishing them happiness with someone else, then I don’t subscribe to that definition. But if love means protecting and wanting to take care of you till my dying day, then I love you more than anyone has ever loved another human being.

I understand I've made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label 'crazy' bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response. When someone asks if you're crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There's no good answer.

We're in Des Moines, Iowa today, were in Omaha, Nebraska yesterday and Boise, Idaho the day before. When we landed at the airport in Boise, from Portland, Oregon this lady from our plane came up from behind as we walked down the terminal. She approached me and said "Taylor, I just love your song and want to wish you great things in you career." I looked and her and said "Well, THANK YOU!" and then said " who did you talk to?". (and then pointed to my Mom and the Label rep we were traveling with) I was convinced that one of them had talked to the lady on the plane and told her about me and my song. The lady said "neither one" and then I said "Well, how did you know who I was?" and the lady said "because I listen to radio and I watched your video". This was the first time someone had actually KNOWN who I was and MY NAME. wow. I just walked over and hugged her, and said ...."You're the first person who's ever done that, thankyou." It was an amazing moment to remember, and I always will.

All I'd wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this.

It was like once again someone was labeling me and putting me in a box just as soon I expressed myself.

Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.

But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books.

The moment when someone attaches you to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want to have a conversation, they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association. And that's not the way to have a conversation.

God! I hated this business of being grown-up. I hated having to make decisions where I didn't know what was behind the door. I wanted a world where heroes and villains were clearly labeled. Where ominous music comes on-screen so you can't possibly mistake him. Where someone asks you to choose between playing with the beautiful princess in the fragrant garden and being eaten by the hideous monster in the foul-smelling pit. Not exactly a difficult one, now is it? Not something that you would agonize over, or that would make you lose a night's sleep?

Heartless’ is a label that is all too often wrongly given to someone who is rational by someone who is emotional.

Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them.

Titles are just constructs to help us label one another to quickly assess what someone is worth without thinking too much.

I think Connor would be the last person to label you like that. You shouldn't get so offended if someone calls you disabled, Aven. You DO have extra challenges that others don't have. It DOES take you longer to do most tasks. Your movements ARE limited. There's a big difference between saying you're disabled and saying you're incapable.

If you want to help someone move on, you don’t label people as good, bad, worst or best. This categorizes people, rather than experiences with that person. People are not all evil or all good. You don’t teach compassion by categorizing people. Empathy and honest open communication are the only way to live your life. If you’re blaming someone then you haven’t let go of your pain long enough to really try on theirs. However, if you must believe that the only type of person that brings you difficult lessons or experiences in life are those that are bad or worse, then take the time to read the bible a little closer. Christ, put a few people in their place, in order to make point.

It's the hardest thing in the world to put yourself in someone else's place, try to really feel what they feel, figure out why they do the things they do. Especially when it's easier to stick a label on something. Or someone.

If I label someone as “bad,” I know my own meaning: he will hurt someone to get what he wants. If I use “evil” it means he will hurt someone even when he doesn’t want anything.

You want to stab me again, don't you?" He didn't look at all ashamed. "Think of it as testing the limits of your new abilities." I groaned. "I've created a monster." "I don't think someone who recently crawled from the grave should be throwing around labels like 'monster,'" he said, making sarcastic little air-quotes fingers. "It wasn't a grave," I sniffed. "It was a comfy four-poster.

But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

You're an abnormality. People get scared when they come across something that doesn't behave the way they expect it to. People like labels and categories and things that they can predict. When people can't explain something, they assume it's because there's something wrong with it. They try to fix it or change it. They mess with it until it's translatable and they bring it down to their level. Trying to change someone is easier than trying to accept them. It's how they were programmed

People say, "I have heart disease," not "I am heart disease." Somehow the presumption of a person's individuality is not compromised by those diagnostic labels. All the labels tell us is that the person has a specific challenge with which he or she struggles in a highly diverse life. But call someone "a schizophrenic" or "a borderline" and the shorthand has a way of closing the chapter on the person. It reduces a multifaceted human being to a diagnosis and lulls us into a false sense that those words tell us who the person is, rather than only telling us how the person suffers.

Don’t put people, or anything else, on pedestals, not even your children. Avoid global labels such as genius or weirdo. Realize those closest get the benefit of the doubt and so do the most beautiful and radiant among us. Know the halo effect causes you to see a nice person as temporarily angry and an angry person as temporarily nice. Know that one good quality, or a memory of several, can keep in your life people who may be doing you more harm than good. Pay attention to the fact that when someone seems nice and upbeat, the words coming out of his or her mouth will change in meaning, and if that same person were depressive, arrogant, or foul in some other way, your perceptions of those same exact words would change along with the person’s other features.

I consider it somewhat psychopathic to label someone from afar as a psychopath. We love nothing more than to declare other people insane, especially people we don’t like.

Everyone wanted me to be the bad boy, the label wanted it, the publicists wanted it, but I was just trying to be myself.

Do not bend yourself to make others feel taller. When someone comes at you telling you what you are and slapping a label on you, simply ask them why. Why would you say that? Make THEM think.

Because the way people are built, Hermione, the way people are built to feel inside -" Harry put a hand over his own heart, in the anatomically correct position, then paused and moved his hand up to point toward his head at around the ear level, "- is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled 'enemy' or 'foreigner' or sometimes just 'stranger'. That's how people are, if they don't learn otherwise.

C-3PO —Thou shalt not label me A mindless, brute philosopher! Nay, nay, Thou overladen glob of grease, thou imp, Thou rubbish bucket fit for scrap, thou blue And silver pile of bantha dung! Now, come, And get thee hence away lest someone sees.

The butcher sold bones, too. We called them "soup bones," but they were actually labeled "dog bones" in the store; people would cook them for their dogs as a treat. Whenever times were really tough we'd fall back on dog bones. my mom would boil them for soup. We'd suck the marrow out of them. Sucking marrow out of bones is a skill poor people lean early. I'll never forget the first time I went to a fancy restaurant as a grown man and someone told me, "You have to try the bone marrow. It's such a delicacy. It's divine." They ordered it, the waiter brought it out, and I was like, "Dog bones, motherfucker!" I was not impressed.

The best thing I can say to you is that we are not only one thing forever. We’re allowed to change at any point in our lives. We don’t have to be stuck with a label someone else assigns us. Gods, we don’t even have to stick to a label we give ourselves. So, you can be bi or pan or a lesbian or queer, and tomorrow you may have a better sense of who you are, or tomorrow you can be a big ole queer mess and figure it out fifty years from now.

If you are someone who feels drawn to mysticism in any way, if you seek to discover life’s mysteries, or if the label “witch” feels comfortable or intriguing to you—you, my amazing reader, are a witch.

And I felt comfort. Finally. All I'd wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this. I knew, deep down, it was more complicated than that, but watching Jason, I was hopeful. He took the mess that was Macbeth and fixed it, and I had to wonder if he might, in some small way, be able to do the same for me. So I moved myself closer to him, and I'd been there ever since.

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then ... we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.

I know now that a friend isn’t someone who lets us be ourselves. No! A friend is someone who will die to keep us from becoming anyone else, someone who fights for us against a world that is constantly trying to shrink us into shelved canisters labeled “how you’re supposed to be.” A friend does everything possible to make sure we become who we are made to be—nothing less, nothing more.

Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.

An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect . . . He claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying, 'Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack.

as a former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary—including violence—to achieve his or her goals. In that conception, a Fascist will likely be a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a Fascist.

I want this; I want to be with you. I just can’t put a label on it. Not yet anyway. My heart can’t take losing someone else,

We feel safer when we can label someone and figure them out, but it’s hardly foolproof. ‘Good people’ are capable of bad behavior. ‘Bad people’ are capable of good behavior.

Nobody really labeled themselves, unless they wanted to escape someone else doing it for them.

Nonhumanity is a dangerous label. If someone is nonhuman, they have no rights, Andrea. No protection.

I actually think a lot of this has to do with the way that we label mental illness. ‘You are depressed’, ‘You are anorexic’, ‘You are Borderline’. You don’t turn around to someone with cancer and say ‘You are cancer’, or to someone who has migraines and say ‘You are a headache’. Is it any wonder that people who are experiencing mental illness struggle to understand the difference between this issue they are up against and who they are as a person?

Because I hated myself so much for my fatness, I always looked for other fat people, and especially for fatter people, to judge as harshly as the world seemed to be judging me. And you know what? There was always someone fatter who was more disgusting than I was, more not with it, and more lazy. It helped me validate myself as mis-seen, misunderstood, and misevaluated. It also helped me find some sort of weird self-esteem that I never could find when looking at myself in the mirror.

Ever since I became an American, people have told me that America is about leaving your past behind. I’ve never understood that. You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind your skin. The compulsion to delve into the past, to speak for the dead, to recover their stories: that’s part of who Evan was, and why I loved him. Just the same, my grandfather is part of who I am, and what he did, he did in the name of my mother and me and my children. I am responsible for his sins, in the same way that I take pride in inheriting the tradition of a great people, a people who, in my grandfather’s time, committed great evil. In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal? Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

When you stopped believing in God," he went on, "did you stop believing in good and evil?" "No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

Rejection isn’t just an emotion we feel. It’s a message that’s sent to the core of who we are, causing us to believe lies about ourselves, others, and God. We connect an event from today to something harsh someone once said. That person’s line becomes a label. The label becomes a lie. And the lie becomes a liability in how we think about ourselves and interact in every future relationship.

An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect. He claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying: Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual.

You are the most important person in your life, so you should treat yourself as such, but few people do. Most are afraid of being seen as selfish and being labeled by their peers as someone with a big ego, as if that automatically means you are a bad person.

People always look for a superhero. I, for one, am glad that you’ve labelled this ‘Subhero.’ It puts the responsibility back on the shoulders of the individual. No more looking for someone swooping in with a heroic rescue. Give and take, help and be helped instead of remaining mired in the muck waiting for one person in the whole world to fix it.

Students usually don't refer to themselves as nerds until someone else accuses them of being one.

When you put labels on someone, it's like sticking them in a box with no air holes until they slowly suffocate. People aren't just one thing. They're many things.

If you don't build a personal brand, someone else will brand you with the wrong label.

Probably not true, but remember this: someone really did design the Titanic and then label it unsinkable. For

Weak-minded people will often label you based on what someone else says. Let them think what they think. You are under no obligation to correct someone’s misguided opinion of you.

Begging for someone to sentence me to a life without magic. Please, forbid me from using it. Label me as a danger. Force me to get stripped.

If you have labelled someone as good or bad, you have created a wall between them and you.

Labels aren't big enough for people. And once you try to categorize someone, you stop looking for who they really are.

Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it.

But the label thing is just part of being human, right? We like to categorize people, so everyone gets labels slapped on them whether they're right or not." I'd never thought about it that way before, but it was true. We even label ourselves; Bad at math. Flirt. Clueless. "They're never right," Ian said, a hint of venom in his voice. "Labels aren't big enough for people. And once you try to categorize someone, you stop looking for who they actually are.

Everyone plays for someone, and Kris didn't play for the big dogs like Sabbath and Zep, she didn't play for the ones who made it, for the wizards who figured out how to turn their music into cars and cash and mansions and an endless party where no one ever gets old. She played for the losers. She played for the bands who never met their rainmaker, the musicians who drank too much and made all the wrong decisions. The singers who got shipped off to state hospitals because they couldn't handle living in the shadow of Black Iron Mountain. She played for the ones who recorded the wrong songs at the right times, and the right songs when it was wrong. The ones who blew it all recording an album that didn't fit the market, the ones who got dropped by their own labels, the singers who moved back home to live in their mom's basements.

Think about the stigma that is attached to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, an incurable illness, and you have it. That's a terrible thing to inflict on someone. Labeling alcoholism as a disease, a cause unto itself, simply no longer fits with what we know today about its causes.

Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels.

In a negotiation, that’s called labeling. Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack.

If only you knew who you really were you would be fearless and love yourself with a grand passion! You are a unique shard of God, the Universe, the whole or whatever label you would like to call it. No one can take your place and without you endless synchronicity and evolution would not happen. You are so powerful that just by walking down the street you can change someone's life forever.

Table 3–1. Definitions of Cognitive Distortions 1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. 4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. 6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.” 7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” 8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

It does seem, in other words, not only more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a woman writer (which corresponds to the male situation of experimental writer vs. writer), but also peculiarly more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a male experimental writer. She may, if young, get caught up in a “movement,” like Djuna Barnes, like H.D., like Laura Riding, as someone’s mistress, and then be forgotten, or if old, she maybe “admitted” into a group, under a label, but never quite as seriously considered as the men in that group.

In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal? Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

If only, I feel now, if only I could be someone able to see all this as if he had no other relation with it than that of seeing it, someone able to observe everything as if he were an adult traveler newly arrived today on the surface of life! If only one had not learned, from birth onwards, to give certain accepted meanings to everything, but instead was able to see the meaning inherent in each thing rather than that imposed on it from without. If only one could know the human reality of the woman selling fish and go beyond just labeling her a fishwife and the known fact that she exists and sells fish. If only one could see the policeman as God sees him. If only one could notice everything for the first time, not apocalyptically, as if they were revelations of the Mystery, but directly as the flowerings of Reality.

Most people expect survivors of this type of abuse to be extremely damaged and seriously disturbed individuals. Certainly most people around expect them to be in great need of psychiatric help... No matter what the survivor is in contact with a particular agency for, the assumption is quickly made that, because of the [ritual] abuse, there must be mental health problems of some kind present. Yet, this is not always the case.

Part of the major problem attending schizophrenia is what it is defined to be, that is, abnormal, rather than an altered state of consciousness that has a specific ecological function for the species. In the West such states are labeled as an illness and are almost always medicated. Most psychoactive drug use is proscribed for exactly the same reason . . . You must not extend perception further than the society wants it to go There are very few people in the West (and virtually none who are clinically schooled) who understand how to train someone in the use of that enhanced perception. Once such gating dynamics are labeled abnormal, accepted to be neuropathological, there is generally no alternative (in that system) except pharmaceutical suppression.

Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn't define you, I thought. I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead.

The company you keep determines how others view you. Identify with mediocrity and you will be labeled sub par. Collaborate with questionable people and your reputation becomes suspect. Guilt by association can end a career, hurt your business and cost you friends. Choose alliances wisely or you may be condemned for someone else's sins.

Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human. The difference between Victor and Eli, he suspected, wasn’t their opinion on EOs. It was their reaction to them.

I’ve been labeled before. I’m supposed to be a jock and then a brain and then one of those music/theater people. I guess I like to keep surprising people. But what kind of life can you live in a tiny square box? My personality is less narrow. I like a lot of different things. But still, people like to be able to put you in a category, to be able to place you in even rows and put a sign at the front. They think the best you can achieve is being at the front of your row…but why not form your own row? Isn’t that the definition of being a leader? Maybe taking charge means something different nowadays. How come lately people think you’re a leader just because you happen to be at the front of the line? A good leader need only point the way and watch as others follow a direction, not a figure. A great leader can lead without anyone ever knowing it. A spectacular leader can lead without ever knowing it themselves. The person at the front of the line is the puppet of someone that you couldn’t name because someone else pointed the way. I must have missed something. I thought being a follower was letting other people shape your life. I thought it meant letting other people decide who you were going to be. I won’t conform. I won’t let people class me. Because once you’re there you’re stuck. I will be whoever I want to be, and no one can stop me. I have something they don’t have, which is nothing to lose. I have my entire life to live and I intend to live it the way I would like to live. I will form my own row. I will point in a new direction. If that means going against other peoples’ opinion of normal, then so be it. Who says normal is right? Normal certainly strikes me as a boring way to live my life.

An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.

I love portraits. I've always been fascinated by the fact that when you put a frame on something you create limits for it. It makes it look dead. The same works with labels, which is a popular hobby most people have nowadays, labeling.

Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human. The difference between Victor and Eli, he suspected, wasn’t their opinion on EOs. It was their reaction to them. Eli seemed intent to slaughter them, but Victor didn’t see why a useful skill should be destroyed, just because of its origin. EOs were weapons, yes, but weapons with minds and wills and bodies, things that could be bent and twisted and broken and USED.

What if our understanding of ourselves were based not on static labels or stages but on our actions and our ability and our willingness to transform ourselves? What if we embraced the messy, evolving, surprising, out-of-control happening that is life and reckoned with its proximity and relationship to death? What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it? What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on? What if our lives were precious only up to a point? What if we held them loosely and understood that there were no guarantees? So that when you got sick you weren’t a stage but in a process? And cancer, just like having your heart broken, or getting a new job, or going to school, were a teacher? What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while—even if and particularly when you were dying—you would be supported by and be part of a community? And what if each of these things were what we were waiting for, moments of opening, of the deepening and the awakening of everyone around us? What if this were the point of our being here rather than acquiring and competing and consuming

I hold no preconceived prejudice against anyone," he'd said, "because to do so is utter folly for someone in my line of work. It's only ignorance that causes individuals to label an entire race as either good or bad. These are generalities so broad as to be both worthless and dangerous. I deal only in specifics. God as they say, is in the details. I must focus on the unique traits of the individual in order to tailor an illusion that will ultimately enchant. To see others in this manner is to never give in to labeling. To fail to do this is the equivalent of putting on a blindfold. Do you understand? The devil is in the details.

Safe relationships are centered and grounded in forgiveness. When you have a friend with the ability to forgive you for hurting her or letting her down, something deeply spiritual occurs in the transaction between you two. You actually experience a glimpse of the deepest nature of God himself. People who forgive can—and should—also be people who confront. What is not confessed can’t be forgiven. God himself confronts our sins and shows us how we wound him: “I have been hurt by their adulterous hearts which turned away from me, and by their eyes, which played the harlot after their idols” (Ezek. 6:9 NASB). When we are made aware of how we hurt a loved one, then we can be reconciled. Therefore, you shouldn’t discount someone who “has something against you,” labeling him as unsafe. He might actually be attempting to come closer in love, in the way that the Bible tells us we are to do.

Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there's nothing learned, nothing gained. It's simple, but it's cowardly.

When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.

Busy’ is worn as a badge of honor these days; the busier we are, the more important we feel. But busy doesn’t mean important. Busy just means you are preoccupied. And often it means you’re distracted. It doesn’t mean you are esteemed, fun, smart, worthy, valued, loved, appreciated, excited, or happy. Busy likely means you are not paying attention to the current moment but instead are hustling around in a fog of things you ‘have’ to do. Busy isn’t special. We are all busy. So why label yourself something so common? You’re better than that.

To be perfectly honest, if I had my way women wouldn’t even be allowed inside grounds, and I certainly believe that if a ground is sold out and a male of the species is locked outside, someone should go in, grab the nearest female and throw her out so that the bloke can have her seat.

Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle, running across someone to whom you can express your feeling so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been mistake to label this "love". It was more like total empathy.

Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my everlasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there's nothing learned, nothing gained. It's simple, but it's cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

Is biblical headship synonymous with taking control over someone else and forcing her to comply when she resists? And, does biblical submission require a wife to always do what her husband says? Does it mean she has no choices of her own or can’t ever say no without being labeled as rebellious or ungodly?

Don’t go putting labels on me. See, what I gather about love is that it’s noble, tender, and means if you love someone enough, you may have to let them go. Understand this, Glyndon, there’s nothing noble or tender about what I feel for you. It’s a violent volcano of obsession, possession, and deranged lust. If you want love, then I do love you, but it’s the unorthodox version of love. I love you enough to let you within my walls. I love you enough to let you talk to my demons. I love you enough to allow you to have a hold over me when I’ve never allowed anyone to have the power to destroy me from the inside out.

To label someone as selfless is symptomatic of having bought the preposterous claim that a human being can have great concern for other human beings and little concern for themselves, or that, when taken to extremes, a human being can have great concern for other human beings and absolutely no concern for themselves.

From now on, whenever someone tells me about the [insert derogatory label here] person living down the street, instead of dismissing them, I want to get to know them. So much of my learning and growth out of the Christian Nationalism mindset has happened because I sat and listened to people of different groups and mindsets.

An intellectual is usually someone who isn’t exactly distinguished by his intellect,” Corelli asserted. “He claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It’s as old as that saying: Tell me what you boast of and I’ll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read SWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORA SUITS (3)-HORA ASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORA Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.

It showed a tiny baby girl floating in a clear glass vessel. The baby held a silver rose in one hand, a golden rose in the other. On its feet were tiny wings, and drops of red liquid showered down on the baby’s long black hair. Underneath the image was a label written in thick black ink indicating that it was a depiction of the philosophical child—an allegorical representation of a crucial step in creating the philosopher’s stone, the chemical substance that promised to make its owner healthy, wealthy, and wise. The colors were luminous and strikingly well preserved. Artists had once mixed crushed stone and gems into their paints to produce such powerful colors. And the image itself had been drawn by someone with real artistic skill. I had to sit on my hands to keep them from trying to learn more from a touch here and there.

it creates an expectation that we should conform to the norms for healthy persons.” “To tell somebody with active Crohn’s or lupus or even diabetes that they’re expected to behave like someone without that disease is absurd and cruel,” Cross says. “And we do it simply because we’re afraid of the stigma associated with the label ‘disabled.

Intuition. Follow your gut and your moral compass about what is right and what is not. Just because you’ve made mistakes doesn’t mean you’re “evil,” and just because you’ve done something for someone else doesn’t mean you’re “good.” Try to throw those labels out. It all comes down to trusting yourself and thinking through actions and consequences.

Calling you a racist and sexist, a bigot and a homophobe, gives them a sense of satisfaction with their status in the universe, even if they never help a single individual human being. This is a bully tactic. When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that’s bullying. When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the government shutdown, that’s bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification. That’s nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.

please don’t make assumptions before you know, based on the incorrect “nonverbal” label, based on how someone looks and acts.

If someone wants to label you against the loving truth of who you are, you are empowered to make the declaration ‘I don’t receive that.

When you put labels on someone, it’s like sticking them in a box with no air holes until they slowly suffocate. People aren’t just one thing. They’re many things.

The opposite of “slut” is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa.

You need to consider people as human beings, not as genders or categories.

Imagine what might happen if you could honestly strip away every label and scrap of tribal identity? What if you were not a Baptist, but simply someone who loved Jesus? What if you weren’t a Republican or a Democrat anymore, but simply a follower of Christ? What if you abandoned your identity as an American and saw yourself simply as a citizen in the Kingdom of God?

On June 8, 2018, with the news of Tony having taken his own life, I was reminded that the labels we put onto others have no bearing on someone else’s pain. The best we can do is to expose our own pain to daylight and pay attention to the twilight messages we might otherwise miss from our loved ones. [Karen Rinaldi, (It’s Great to) Suck at Something (New York: Atria, 2019)]

I was called an 'ethnic traitor' and kicked in the pit of the stomach, then called a 'sellout' and stuck across the face again. I really couldn't understand what the last one meant. I knew the literal meaning of the word, of course, but I just couldn't bring myself to think that I was a sellout. I could sense the incongruity of the label but didn't have words to express it. Then someone who was able to say exactly what I was feeling appeared, like a superhero. A voice rose up from the back of the classroom. "We've never belonged to a country we could sell out

The 'Mind' in it's nature is conditioned to 'label'. From people, to situations, and circumstances to everything in between. When we allow the mind to shut down we let things be as they are.

She tapped her chest. “No, I’m not a freak, okay, so could you stop pressuring me.” Rafael muttered something under his breath, throwing up his hands in surrender. “So what am I? What’s Karhl, Jayani, my brother, and all the BaSatai? Are we all freaks? Just because this human has some kind of fascination with labeling you, you believe in it. Be your own person, Armani, not what someone else says you are.

To have a man whose name is on the label showing such interest, commitment, and determination for the best is a wonderful thing. This is someone who will throw money at quality, who believes in being the best. Never knock it. Would you prefer to have a bean counter in corporate headquarters, someone who never comes near the brewery, making decisions solely on the basis of the bottom line and profit margins?

When someone proactively labels themselves an "introvert" or even an "extrovert," they've officially made themself "dumber"--unless for some reason one of those labels will enable them to achieve a particular goal.

I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsom. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsom in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'? 'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsom can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.

When you stopped believing in God did you stop believing in good and evil?” “No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

When you stopped believing in God,” he went on, “did you stop believing in good and evil?” “No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.” “Yes,

The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again... ...Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

When we listen to ourselves with callous objectivity—trying to diagnose and eradicate our problems with effective solutions—this “listening” rarely works. Think of the people who treat you this way: those who can’t see beyond their labels and judgments of you. Those who only “listen” for long enough to decide which advice to give you. It feels horrible. This same attitude prevents us from hearing our inner conversations. When we feel like someone has an agenda, we resist. Trying to fix ourselves while pretending to love ourselves doesn’t work. We don’t heal through objectification. We heal through understanding. We need to feel appreciated by the people who help us—ourselves included.

Last names … they were like word parasites. They attached to people in strange ways, moved across cultural and political lines, traveled the world and reattached to others, certainly at whim and seemingly at random. Why didn’t anybody else see how creepy last names were? They labeled a person as coming from a particular class or geographical area or linked their identity to another person, as if someone’s identity had no merit on its own unless it had latched on to another.

Bullshit!” Simms barked. “Your boy here as good as confessed to doing this when he saw those pictures!” “It's the same reaction you'd get if someone handed you a bottle with a bio-hazard label on it and told you to be reallllll careful with it.

It doesn’t take much. A poem. A catch. A glance. A roll of the dice. And it doesn’t matter what’s true and what isn’t. Doesn’t matter what you think you know about yourself. The things you have the guts to tell people and the things you don’t. You get your label, and then you get ignored, or sometimes you get teased, but mostly you go about your business, thinking things that you would never say out loud, not to someone’s face. But there are some words you know you can’t say. Not out loud, not without getting into serious trouble. You might whisper them to your friends, but you would never write them down. Instead you find some other way. A secret code. An inside joke… And everyone knows what it means, but nobody says anything.

Do you consider yourself a nobody? What weight does that label even have? It’s a silly label. As silly as the label 'somebody'. Silly and non-adhesive. First off, to be thought of as a nobody someone has to be thinking of you in the first place. Second, being a so-called 'nobody' doesn’t make you irrelevant. We are all relevant to somebody else but unfortunately, we can lose sight of our most germane and important relationships when we chase the approval of people we don’t even know.

And she needed to surf some of the pregnancy websites she'd found when she first realized she was pregnant. Her friends with kids said there was lots of good information available on the sites. But had they meant the slideshow labeled "Poppy seed to pumpkin: how big is your baby? Imagining her unborn child as an ear of corn was odd enough. But would she ever get used to the thought that by the end of this pregnancy, she'd be carrying around something--someone--the size of a small pumpkin?

humility calls us to realize that what is toxic for us may not be toxic for others. If you have a toxic experience with someone that leaves you frustrated and discouraged, rethinking conversations late at night, finding your blood pressure rising, and (especially this!) seeing it keep you from being present with loved ones long after the toxic interaction is over, then for you that relationship isn’t healthy. But I’m reluctant to too hastily apply the label “toxic” in an absolutist sense.

Like all labels, they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?

Chapter 8 explores Jesus’ famous passage where he warns us not to throw pearls to pigs. Chapter 9 looks at the difference between labeling and name-calling; if it seems harsh to you to call someone “toxic,” you’ll find this chapter particularly helpful.

You were not really in the area,” she says now. “You look just like your father used to look when he lied to me.” I laugh. “How’s that?” “Like you’ve swallowed a lemon. Once, when your father was maybe five, he stole my nail polish remover. When I asked him about it, he lied. Eventually I found it in his sock drawer and told him so. He became hysterical. Turned out he read the label and thought it would make me—someone Polish—disappear. He hid it before it could do its job.” Nana smiles. “I loved that boy,

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled "enemy?" Weren't the Russians communists when they helped us slap down the Germans? And now. What could we do with the Russian nation if we bombed it to bits? How could we "rule" such a mass of foreign people - - - we, who don't even speak the Russian language? How could we control them under our "democratic" system...?

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

I’ve seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The “free-range vegetarian hens” testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone’s trained them with little shock collars.)

He kept telling himself he wasn’t ready to label whatever he had with Dex, especially since it was strictly between them, so what was the point, but what else was Dex if not his boyfriend? They weren’t sleeping around. Hell, the thought of Dex being fucked by someone else made him want to punch something. Dex

There are no winners and losers. We seek a win-win. Seeing opportunity in cri- sis. Believe in yourself, and those around. Celebrate each other’s strengths; we do not celebrate when someone fails. It is a shift. With our insights and consciousness comes our vowed responsibility, our vowed compassion, and our vowed unity— with that comes power. The choice to do right. The choice to include. The choice to forgive. The choice to love anyway. This is your power. No matter what has been taken from you, what society has or hasn’t allowed you, what labels or beliefs limit you, your choice, your response, your action is your power.

I had asked Todd once if he was gay, and he had said he didn’t care if someone was a man or a woman, he was more interested in the person’s inside. “So are you bisexual?” I had asked, and he had laughed at my insistence on a label. “I guess I’m bipossible,” he had said, and pressed a warm, careless kiss on my lips.

I've been mad at the world for a long time. It’s hard not to be mad at the world when you're eleven years old and everyone you know is suffering, when your mother cries herself to sleep and you can recognize your father's hospital room by the smell of his blood. But the summer before my sophomore year, I learned my great-great-grandfather was a socialist, and suddenly I had the words for why I wanted to bum it all down. Because none of this is real. It's real but it ain't real, it ain't real the way mountains or the rings inside a tree are real. You can't open a book on the laws of physics and find a chapter labeled "Exploiting Workers for Profit and Killing Them When They Ask You to Stop." It's fake! Someone made it up! Workers are exploited, rent is astro-nomical, the cost of healthcare is life-destroying not because they are the path a river carves through a canyon, but because some capitalist fuckers decided they wanted it this way.

Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord to invective was not badness but just such self-righteousness as this…He said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, “Amen I say to you, they have received their reward” (Matt. 6:2). They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were for those who had sinned and had not been found out…He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody’s target, and everybody knew that they were wrong…And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled as sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His death, were coverts drawn from thieves and from prostitutes. Those who were aligned against Him were the nice people who stood high in the community—the worldly, prosperous people, the men of big business, the judges of law courts who governed by expediency, the “civic-minded” individuals whose true selfishness was veneered over with public generosity. Such men as these opposed him and sent Him to His death.

My other client, whom I will call Teresa, thought Lorraine had MPD and hoped I could help her. Almost no one recognized this condition in those days. Lorraine was forty years old and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was thirteen. She had had various diagnoses, mainly severe depression, and she had made quite a few serious suicide attempts before I even met her. She had been given many courses of electric shock therapy, which would confuse her so much that she could not get together a coherent suicide plan for quite a while. Lorraine’s psychiatrist was initially opposed to my seeing her, as her friend Teresa had been stigmatized with the "borderline personality disorder" diagnosis when in hospital, so was seen as a bad influence on her. But after Lorraine spent a couple of months in hospital calling herself Susie and acting consistently like a child, he was humble enough to acknowledge that perhaps he could learn some new things, and someone else’s help might be a good idea.

Diagnoses—labels—also help connect people with resources that may often be useful. My caveats are reserved for those all-too-common situations in which parents, teachers, and medical professionals are quick to label someone as “disordered” (whatever that means) when the real problem is a mismatch between a child and a given environment.

school. If they were wonderful, school was wonderful. It had always been that way for me. And if the teachers believed in me, that was at least the first step in a long journey of believing in myself. This was especially true during my more vulnerable moments, back when I was labeled “truant” and “discipline problem.” I was always seeing myself through the eyes of adults, my parents, caseworkers, psychiatrists, and teachers. If I saw a failure in their eyes, then I was one. And if I saw someone capable, then I was capable. Professional adults had credibility and were my standard for deciding what was legitimate or not, including myself. Previously, when teachers like Ms. Nedgrin saw me as a victim—despite her good intentions—that’s what I believed about myself, too. Now I had teachers at Prep who held me to a higher standard, and that helped me rise to the occasion. If I kept at it, slowly, I could do this. The deeply personal relationships with my teachers in this intimate school setting made me believe it.

Gating activity outside of the normal bell-shaped curve for the population of the United States is, generally, considered to be pathological. The more widely open gating channels are, the more likely someone is to be defined as clinically abnormal and to be labeled, one way or another, as having “stimulus filtering difficulties” or “gating deficits.

Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack. Labeling

And Schyogolev launched on a discussion of politics. Like many unpaid windbags he thought that he could combine the reports he read in the papers by paid windbags into an orderly scheme, upon following which a logical and sober mind (in this case his mind) could with no effort explain and foresee a multitude of world events. The names of countries and of their leading representatives became in his hands something in the nature of labels for more or less full but essentially identical vessels, whose contents he poured this way and that. France was AFRAID of something or other and therefore would never allow it. England was AIMING at something. This statesman CRAVED a rapprochement, while that one wanted to increase his PRESTIGE. Someone was PLOTTING and someone was STRIVING for something. In short, the world Schyogolev created came out as some kind of collection of limited, humorless, faceless and abstract bullies, and the more brains, cunning and circumspection he found in their mutual activities the more stupid, vulgar and simple his world became.

Yet an anxiety disorder is simply an experience that a person moves through, just like a period of grief or sadness. Would we give a person with a broken heart or someone suffering from grief a label for life? No, yet people who go through a period of anxiety sometimes end up believing that this diagnosis, this label, is now a part of who they are.   “HOW

You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in "spiritual direction". Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters. If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like "spiritual direction"? Why not just "friend"? Spiritual direction strikes me as pretentious in these circumstances, as if there were some expertise that can be acquired more or less on its own and then dispensed on demand. The other reason for my lack of enthusiasm is my well-founded fear of professionalism in any and all matters of the Christian life. Or maybe the right label for my fear is "functionalism". The moment an aspect of Christian living (human life, for that matter) is defined as a role, it is distorted, debased - and eventually destroyed. We are brothers and sisters with one another, friends and lovers, saints and sinners. The irony here is that the rise of interest in spiritual direction almost certainly comes from the proliferation of role-defined activism in our culture. We are sick and tired of being slotted into a function and then manipulated with Scripture and prayer to do what someone has decided (often with the help of some psychological testing) that we should be doing to bring glory to some religious enterprise or other. And so when people begin to show up who are interested in us just as we are - our souls - we are ready to be paid attention to in this prayerful, listening, non-manipulative, nonfunctional way. Spiritual direction. But then it begins to develop a culture and language and hierarchy all its own. It becomes first a special interest, and then a specialization. That is what seems to be happening in the circles you are frequenting. I seriously doubt that it is a healthy (holy) line to be pursuing. Instead, why don't you look over the congregation on Sundays and pick someone who appears to be mature and congenial. Ask her or him if you can meet together every month or so - you feel the need to talk about your life in the company of someone who believes that Jesus is present and active in everything you are doing. Reassure the person that he or she doesn't have to say anything "wise". You only want them to be there for you to listen and be prayerful in the listening. After three or four such meetings, write to me what has transpired, and we'll discuss it further. I've had a number of men and women who have served me in this way over the years - none carried the title "spiritual director", although that is what they have been. Some had never heard of such a term. When I moved to Canada a few years ago and had to leave a long-term relationship of this sort, I looked around for someone whom I could be with in this way. I picked a man whom I knew to be a person of integrity and prayer, with seasoned Christian wisdom in his bones. I anticipated that he would disqualify himself. So I pre-composed my rebuttal: "All I want you to do is two things: show up and shut up. Can you do that? Meet with me every six weeks or so, and just be there - an honest, prayerful presence with no responsibility to be anything other than what you have become in your obedient lifetime." And it worked. If that is what you mean by "spiritual director," okay. But I still prefer "friend". You can see now from my comments that my gut feeling is that the most mature and reliable Christian guidance and understanding comes out of the most immediate and local of settings. The ordinary way. We have to break this cultural habit of sending out for an expert every time we feel we need some assistance. Wisdom is not a matter of expertise. The peace of the Lord, Eugene

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing? Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me.

No, they’re just black vinyl. Probably somebody else’s record that didn’t sell for shit and they got stuck with a bunch of leftovers. They hit it with some spray paint and stick a commemorative label on it and you’ve got your ‘Official Gold Record.’ Kind of ironic though, isn’t it…marking your success with someone else’s failure.” --Reggie Sinclair from Angela's Coven

Trump is most certainly not a secularist—someone who lives his life apart from religious belief or practice. As one who, for years, did not fight the label “billionaire playboy,” Trump could be described as a pleasure-seeker or a materialist (values material things more than the spiritual). But Trump has not lived apart from religion. In this regard, he is very American.

I always felt that someone, a long time ago, organized the affairs of the world into areas that made sense-catagories of stuff that is perfectible, things that fit neatly in perfect bundles. The world of business, for example, is this way-line items, spreadsheets, things that add up, that can be perfected. The legal system-not always perfect, but nonetheless a mind-numbing effort to actually write down all kinds of laws and instructions that cover all aspects of being human, a kind of umbrella code of conduct we should all follow. Perfection is crucial in building an aircraft, a bridge, or a high-speed train. The code and mathematics residing just below the surface of the Internet is also this way. Things are either perfectly right or they will not work. So much of the world we work and live in is based upon being correct, being perfect. But after this someone got through organizing everything just perfectly, he (or probably a she) was left with a bunch of stuff that didn't fit anywhere-things in a shoe box that had to go somewhere. So in desperation this person threw up her arms and said, 'OK! Fine. All the rest of this stuff that isn't perfectible, that doesn't seem to fit anywhere else, will just have to be piled into this last, rather large, tattered box that we can sort of push behind the couch. Maybe later we can come back and figure where it all is supposed to fit in. Let's label the box ART.' The problem was thankfully never fixed, and in time the box overflowed as more and more art piled up. I think the dilemma exists because art, among all the other tidy categories, most closely resembles what it is like to be human. To be alive. It is our nature to be imperfect. The have uncategorized feelings and emotions. To make or do things that don't sometimes necessarily make sense. Art is all just perfectly imperfect. Once the word ART enters the description of what you're up to , it is almost getting a hall pass from perfection. It thankfully releases us from any expectation of perfection. In relation to my own work not being perfect, I just always point to the tattered box behind the couch and mention the word ART, and people seem to understand and let you off the hook about being perfect a go back to their business.

I'm just asking you to accept that there are some people who will go to extraordinary lengths to cover up the facts that they are abusing children. What words are there to describe what happened to me, what was done to me? Some call it ritual abuse, others call it organised abuse. There are those that call it satanic. I've heard all the phrases, not just in relation to me, but also with regard to those I work with and try to help. Do you know what I think? It doesn't matter how you dress it up, it doesn't matter what label you put on it. It is abuse, pure and simple. It is adults abusing children. It is adults deciding - actually making a conscious decision, a conscious choices that what they want, what they convince themselves they need, is more important than anything else; certainly more important than the safety or feelings or sanity of a child. However, there can be differences which are layered on top of that abuse. I'm not saying that some abuse is worse than others, or that someone 'wins' the competition to have the worst abuse inflicted on them, but ritual and organised abuse is at the extreme end of the spectrum. If we try to think of a continuum where there are lots of different things imposed on children (or, for that matter, anyone who is forced into these things — and that force can take many forms, it can be threats and promises, as well as kicks and punches), then ritual and organised abuse is intense and complicated. It often involves multiple abusers of both sexes. There can be extreme violence, mind control, systematic torture and even, in some cases, a complex belief system which is sometimes described as religion. I say 'described as' religion because, to me, I think that when this aspect is involved, it is window dressing. I'm not religious. I cried many times for God to save me. I was always ignored — how could I believe? However, I think that ritual abusers who do use religious imagery or 'beliefs' are doing so to justify it all to themselves, or to confuse the victim, or to hide their activities. Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet.

For those who seem to have difficulty moving forward: "Sometimes Destiny is calling but you refuse to give in to the signs because of past hurts and baggages. Sometimes the love you are searching for all this time is just right in front of you but you remain to be blind because of fear. Because of always thinking that things may not work out right instead of telling yourself that you should move forward and get happy again.Why not think instead of how beautiful something could turn out to be if you take that chance and go for it than merely let the chance pass you by again and live a life of "what ifs" along the way?You cannot label each special person you meet in this life as "the One Who Got Away". Move forward, dear one, you just don't know how special you are in someone's eyes." -Elizabeth's Quotes

Zach: Are you close with your brother? He’s partially to blame for the wrong number thing, isn’t he? * * * Me: Kind of. Yeah, we’re close. My mom worked at the hospital so it was usually just us two fending for ourselves. * * * Me: Okay, so I shouldn’t say fending for ourselves. That makes me sound like a dick and unappreciative of all my mom did. We just spent many nights just the two of us because my mom was a hardworking single lady and she wasn’t searching for a man to put a ring on it because she. Is. Fierce. * * * Zach: I bet your mom is the shit. * * * Me: She really is. You should meet her sometime. * * * Me: Oh, awkward…I’m talking about meeting the family and we’re not even officially a couple. * * * Zach: We’re not? * * * Me: We are? My phone lights up with a call from Zach. “Are you saying we aren’t dating?” he says before I can say anything. “We are…” “Are you saying you’re wanting to see other people?” “No…” “So then we’re a couple.” I’m quiet, unsure what to say. I’m so scared to label this, which is stupid, I know. “Delia?” “Yes, Zach?” “Do you not want to be?” I take a deep breath and push out the answer I know is right, even though my head is saying otherwise. “No. I want to be a couple.” “Are you sure?” “Yes. I’m just…scared. I know I shouldn’t put that all on you, but you’re kind of the reason I’m scared. I like you, Zach—a lot—but what if this doesn’t work out? What if we jump in too soon?” He sighs. “Remember when we were talking about our exes? About the lack of fireworks?” “Yeah.” “I swear to god, someone is going to swoop in and take my man card for this shit, but I felt them with you. When we first kissed, I knew right then you were worth jumping in with both feet and taking a risk.” I don’t let myself overthink his words, wanting to keep my head level and clear. “What if I’m not worth the risk?” “We’ll never know if we don’t take it.” “Say you’re a couple already, Dalilah!” Robbie’s voice comes loud through the speaker. “He paused the movie during an epic scene!” “How many times have I told you that her name is Delia. Deal-ya. Get it?” “You talk about me with Robbie?” I ask. “Sometimes.” “Say yes! He looks like someone kicked his goat!” “Shut the fuck up, Robbie!” I laugh. “If I say yes, will he stop shouting?” “YES!” Robbie shouts again. “I’ll take the risk, Zach, but you better be worth it.” “You’ve seen my Harry Potter underwear—you know I’m worth it.” Then he whispers, “Wink.

Labels can serve goals, but goals should never serve labels. When a goal serves a label, you've made the label your ultimate reality, and you've created a life to prove or support that label. You see this when someone says, "I'm pursuing this because I'm an extrovert." This form of goal-setting occurs when you base your goals on your current persona rather than setting goals that expand upon and change who you are.

And I am overwhelmed now by the awfulness of over-simplification. For now I realize that not only have I been guilty of it through this long and burning day but also through most of my yet young life and it is only now that I am doubly its victim that I begin to vaguely understand. For I had somehow thought that ‘going away’ was but a physical thing. And that it had only to do with movement and with labels like the silly ‘Vancouver’ that I had glibly rolled from off my tongue; or with the crossing of bodies of water or with the boundaries of borders. And because my father told me I was ‘free’ I had foolishly felt that it was really so. Just like that. And I realize now that the older people of my past are more complicated than perhaps I had ever thought. And that there are distinctions between my sentimental, romantic grandfather and his love for coal, and my stern and practical grandmother her hatred of it; and my quietly strong but passive mother and the souring extremes of my father’s passionate violence and the quiet power of his love. They are all so different. Perhaps it is possible I think now to be both and yet to see only one. For the man in whose glassed-in car I now sit sees only similarity. For him the people of this multi-scarred little town are reduced to but a few phrases and the act of sexual intercourse. They are only so many identical goldfish leading identical, incomprehensible lives within the glass prison of their bowl. And the people on the street view me from behind my own glass in much the same way and it is the way that I have looked at others in their ‘foreign licence’ cars and it is the kind of judgment that I myself have made. And yet it seems that neither these people nor this man are in any way unkind and not to understand does not necessarily mean that one is cruel. But one should at least be honest. And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am. I do not know. I am not sure. But I do know that I cannot follow this man into a house that is so much like the one I have left this morning and go down into the sexual embrace of a woman who might well be my mother. And I do not know what she, my mother, may be like in the years to come when she is deprived of the lighting movement of my father’s body and the hammered pounding of his heart. For I do not know when he may die. And I do not know in what darkness she may cry out his name nor to whom. I do not know very much of anything, it seems, except that I have been wrong and dishonest with others and myself. And perhaps this man has left footprints on a soul I did not even know that I possessed.

When you stopped believing in God,” he went on, “did you stop believing in good and evil?” “No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

It’s not just sight and sound that are ratcheted up, either. My skin is so sensitive that I can tell you whether my shirt is cotton or polyester just by its temperature against my back. I have to cut all the labels out of my clothes so they don’t rub because they feel like coarse sandpaper. If someone touches me when I am not expecting it, I scream – not out of fear but because it sometimes feels like my nerve endings are on the outside rather than the inside.

It is unfortunate that in some places, especially in the United States, people have resisted making choices that will keep them and their families safer. I don’t agree with these choices, but I also think it’s unhelpful to simply label them “anti-science,” as so many people do. In her book On Immunity, Eula Biss looks at vaccine hesitancy in a way that I think also helps explain the resentment we’re seeing toward other public health measures. The distrust of science is just one factor, she says, and it is compounded by other things that trigger fear and suspicion: pharmaceutical companies, big government, elites, the medical establishment, male authority. For some people, invisible benefits that might materialize in the future are not enough to get them past the worry that someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The problem is even worse in periods of severe political polarization, such as the one we’re in now.

A woman’s greatest knack is how well she can hide how much sleep she’s been missing. There’s a little tally board inside each of us labeled, “Number of days since someone has told me I look tired” that resets itself whenever we make the mistake of looking like we feel. And the alternative? Even if you fulfill obligations, party like you mean it, and somehow get your sleep, your decisions will be too well-informed to be spontaneous. You’ll never be susceptible to life.

I've been looking everywhere, I've ever turned rocks to find someone, i been talking to the baboon under the banana tree hoping he can tell me where to find the one for me, I've changed from Black label to Windhoek lager hoping it will change me and that you will come along, I've been going to church just in case your waiting for me there, I've been up in clubs just to find you there but it never happened at all and now I've stopped looking hoping you will find me instead!!

These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or a dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally, “amateur,” from the Latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly a “dilettante,” from the Latin delectare, “to find delight in,” was someone who enjoyed a given activity.

Victor wasn’t sure how he felt about EOs. Up until he fetched Sydney from the side of the road, he’d only ever known one EO, himself excluded, and that was Eli. If he’d had to judge based on the two of them, then ExtraOrdinaries were damaged, to say the least. But these words people threw around—humans, monsters, heroes, villains—to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics. Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human. The difference between Victor and Eli, he suspected, wasn’t their opinion on EOs. It was their reaction to them. Eli seemed intent to slaughter them, but Victor didn’t see why a useful skill should be destroyed, just because of its origin. EOs were weapons, yes, but weapons with minds and wills and bodies, things that could be bent and twisted and broken and used.

The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes is a fascinating insight into this world. A crooked, though brilliant, Indonesian wine connoisseur called Rudy Kurniawan was able to replicate great burgundies by mixing cheaper wines together, before faking the corks and the labels. He was rumbled only when he attempted to fake wines from vintages that did not exist. I am told that it is possible to detect a forged Kurniawan wine by analysing the labels, but not by tasting the wine. I hate to say this, but Rudy was an alchemist. Several experts I have talked to in the high-end wine business regard their own field as essentially a placebo market; one of them admitted that he was relatively uninterested in the products he sold and would sneak off and fetch a beer at premium tastings of burgundies costing thousands of pounds a bottle. Another described himself as ‘the eunuch in the whorehouse’ – someone who was valuable because he was immune to the charms of the product he promoted.

And she needed to surf some of the pregnancy websites she'd found when she first realized she was pregnant. Her friends with kids said there was lots of good information available on the sites. But had they meant the slideshow labeled "Poppy seed to pumpkin: how big is your baby"? Imagining her unborn child as an ear of corn was odd enough. But would she ever get used to the thought that by the end of this pregnancy, she'd be carrying around something--someone--the size of a small pumpkin?

I bump into a group of girls congregating around a locker. Jessica, Willow (who is notably the only Willow enrolled in our 397-student class and in our 1,579-student school), and Abby. Miney has labeled them in my notebook, in block letters and underlined with a Sharpie:THE POPULAR BITCHES. When she first used this designation, Miney had to give me a long lecture about how this wasn’t an oxymoron, how someone could be both popular, which I presumed meant that lots of people liked you, and at the same time also be a bitch, which I presumed would have the opposite outcome. Apparently popularity in the context of high school has a negative correlation with people actually liking you but a high correlation with people wanting to be your friend. After careful consideration, this makes sense, though in my case, I am both an outlier and a great example of the fact that correlation does not imply causation. I am nice to everyone but without any upside: People neither like me nor want to be my friend.

who is actually delusional? Who is actually following Jesus: fundamentalist Christians rejecting gay men and lesbians’ right to marry, or atheist humanists treating men and women with love and dignity? Fact-based, enlightened atheists sometimes treat people like shit, and delusional fundamentalists sometimes miss a book event in order to help a lonely hotel maid. Labels don’t mean anything. Who cares about labels when someone is slapping you in the face? Who cares about labels when someone is saving you from drowning?

He caught my hand and drew me closer to his side. “Well, should I begin to list them one by one, and by name? If I did it would take several hours. If there had been someone special, all I would do is name one—and I can’t do that. I liked them all . . . but I didn’t like any well enough to love, if that’s what you want to know.” Yes, that was exactly what I wanted to know. “I’m sure you didn’t live a celibate life, even though you didn’t fall in love . . . ?” “That’s none of your business,” he said lightly. “I think it is. It would give me peace to know you had a girl you loved.” “I do have a girl I love,” he answered. “I’ve known her all my life. When I go to sleep at night, I dream of her, dancing overhead, calling my name, kissing my cheek, screaming when she has nightmares, and I wake up to take the tar from her hair. There are times when I wake up to ache all over, as she aches all over, and I dream I kiss the marks the whip made . . . and I dream of a certain night when she and I went out on the cold slate roof and stared up at the sky, and she said the moon was the eye of God looking down and condemning us for what we were. So there, Cathy, is the girl who haunts me and rules me, and fills me with frustrations, and darkens all the hours I spend with other girls who just can’t live up to the standards she set. And I hope to God you’re satisfied.” I turned to move as in a dream, and in that dream I put my arms about him and stared up into his face, his beautiful face that haunted me too. “Don’t love me, Chris. Forget about me. Do as I do, take whomever knocks first on your door, and let her in.” He smiled ironically and put me quickly from him. “I did exactly what you did, Catherine Doll, the first who knocked on my door was let in—and now I can’t drive her out. But that’s my problem—not yours.” “I don’t deserve to be there. I’m not an angel, not a saint . . . you should know that.” “Angel, saint, Devil’s spawn, good or evil, you’ve got me pinned to the wall and labeled as yours until the day I die. And if you die first, then it won’t be long before I follow.

Maud sighed. “Because some people have rigid minds. They like everything to be clearly labeled. They have a box for everyone they meet. A box for vampires, a box for lees, a box for humans. When someone doesn’t fit into their boxes, they panic.” “But why?” “I don’t exactly know, my flower. I think it’s because they lack confidence. They think they figured out the rules of their world and when something falls outside those rules, it scares them.” “So, I’m scary?” “To those people? Yes. If the rules they made up don’t apply anymore, they don’t know how to act, and it makes them feel like their survival is in doubt. Instead of adapting to a new situation and coming up with a new set of rules, some of them will fight to the death trying to keep the world the way it was. Do you remember when we lived in Fort Kur? What was written above the door?” “Adapt or die,” Helen said. “It’s impossible to stop change,” Maud said. “It’s the nature of life. Those who refuse to adapt will eventually die out. But before they do, they will get nasty. They might even hate you.

There can be a mismatch of attachment expectations. As mentioned earlier, not all relationships have to be attachment-based, but ideally all parties involved in the relationship need to agree about this. Very painful and confusing situations can arise when one person wants a certain relationship to meet their attachment needs, but the other person does not want the same level of involvement, or if a person wants an attachment-based relationship in theory but is practically or situationally unable to provide at that level. When I see clients struggling with attachment anxiety because a partner gives mixed signals or is inconsistent in their responsiveness, support, or availability, it is important to explore whether or not they are expecting this partner to be an attachment figure for them. If they are, then it is paramount for them to dialogue with their partner about whether or not that partner wants to be in the role of an attachment figure for them, as well as honestly assessing if the partner has enough time, capacity and/or space in their life and other relationships to show up to the degree required for being polysecure together. Some people prefer not to define their relationships, preferring to explore and experience them without labels or traditional expectations. As long as this level of ambiguity or relationship fluidity is a match for everyone involved, it can be a very liberating and satisfying way to relate with others. But when someone casts a partner in the role of attachment figure, but that person is unable or unwilling to play the part, much pain, frustration, disappointment, heartache and attachment anxiety ensues.

We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone—our parents, teachers, analysts—hypnotizes us to "see" the world and construe it in the "right" way. These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us. The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we can become undeaf, unblind, and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meaning in the new book of our existence.

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking The tendency to think in extremes like “always” and “never” without considering nuanced degrees between. “My boyfriend broke up with me; I always ruin my relationships.” 2. Overgeneralization The tendency to make broad assumptions based on limited specifics. “If one person thinks I’m stupid, everyone will.” 3. Mental Filter The tendency to focus on small negative details to the exclusion of the big picture. “My A+ average doesn’t matter; I got a C on an assignment.” 4. Disqualifying the Positive The tendency to dismiss positive aspects of an experience for irrational reasons. “If my friend compliments me, she is probably just saying it out of pity.” 5. Jumping to Conclusions The tendency to make unfounded, negative assumptions, often in the form of attempted mind reading or fortune telling. “If my romantic interest doesn’t text me today, he must not be interested.” 6. Catastrophizing The tendency to magnify or minimize certain details of an experience, painting it as worse or more severe than it is. “If my wife leaves me, then I will never be able to recover from my misery.” 7. Emotional Reasoning The tendency to take one’s emotions as evidence of objective truth. “If I feel offended by someone else’s remark, then he must have wronged me.” 8. Should Statements The tendency to apply rigid rules to how one “should” or “must” behave. “My friend criticized my attitude, and that is something that friends should never do.” 9. Labeling The tendency to describe oneself in the form of absolute labels. “If I make a calculation error, it makes me a total idiot.” 10. Personalization The tendency to attribute negative outcomes to oneself without evidence. “If my wife is in a bad mood, then I must have done something to upset her.

Dusk, they’d labeled the room—as if out of all the worlds mentioned within, this world remained their focus. This place. Pelias told her it was a world the Daglan had long coveted but had not had the chance to conquer. An empty world, but one of plenty. She had no way of knowing that he had spent our era of peace learning ancient summoning magic and searching the cosmos for whatever remained of the Daglan on other worlds. What he wanted from them, I can only guess—perhaps he knew that to wrest the Trove from Theia and seize power for himself, he needed someone more powerful than he was.

The marketing geniuses on the corporate side of the country music labels had decided to start using focus groups to test their products before they were developed or released. An example of this would be to ask the focus group whether they liked sad songs or happy songs. “We like happy songs!” the focus group would chirp, and the word would go back to the writers and producers to come up with “happy” songs to record. This made it especially hard on the songwriters, who rarely feel a need to write when they are happy, as then they are busy luxuriating in the pleasure of happiness. When something bad happens, they want to find a way to transcend it, so they write a song about it. When Hank Williams, one of the greatest and most successful country artists of all time, wrote a song like “Your Cheatin’ Heart” or “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” he wasn’t writing “happy” songs, yet they made the listener feel better. The listener could feel that someone else had gone through an experience similar to the listener’s own, and then went to the trouble and effort to write it down accurately and share the experience like a compassionate friend might do. In this way, hearing a song like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” could make the listener feel better, or “happy.

Yet, could it be (we should press the question) that there are some circumstances in which being overly esteemed in one’s capacity as a knower would do one harm of a sort that merits the label ‘testimonial injustice’? Suppose we imagine someone growing up who, because of various social prejudices overwhelmingly in his favour, is constantly epistemically puffed up by the people around him. Let’s say that he is a member of a ruling elite, and that his education and entire upbringing are subtly geared to installing this message firmly in his psychology. Perhaps the pupils who attend his school even wind up with a distinctive accent and certainly a confident air that helps mark them out as epistemically authoritative. No doubt the credibility excess he tends to receive from most interlocutors in his class-ridden society will be advantageous: it is very likely to bring him lucrative employment and a certain automatic high status in many of his discursive exchanges, and so on. But what if all this also causes him to develop such an epistemic arrogance that a range of epistemic virtues are put out of his reach, rendering him closed-minded, dogmatic, blithely impervious to criticism, and so on? Is it not the case that such a person has in some degree quite literally been made a fool of?

There is no evil in things changing, just as there is no good in persisting in a new state.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 4.42 When people say change is good, they’re usually trying to reassure someone (or themselves). Because instinctively we view change as bad—or at least we’re suspicious of it. The Stoics want you to do away with those labels altogether. Change isn’t good. The status quo isn’t bad. They just are. Remember, events are objective. It’s only our opinion that says something is good or bad (and thus worth fighting against or fighting for). A better attitude? To decide to make the most of everything. But to do that you must first cease fighting.

Preschoolers make a number of assumptions about words and their meaning as they acquire language, one of the most important of which is what the psychologist Ellen Markman calls the principle of mutual exclusivity. Simply put, this means that small children have difficulty believing that any one object can have two different names. The natural assumption of children, Markman argues, is that if an object or person is given a second label, then that label must refer to some secondary property or attribute of that object. You can see how useful this assumption is to a child faced with the extraordinary task of assigning a word to everything in the world. A child who learns the word elephant knows, with absolute certainty, that it is something different from a dog. Each new word makes the child's knowledge of the world more precise. Without mutual exclusivity, by contrast, if a child thought that elephant could simply be another label for dog, then each new word would make the world seem more complicated. Mutual exclusivity also helps the child think clearly. "Suppose," Markman writes, "a child who already knows 'apple' and 'red' hears someone refer to an apple as 'round.' By mutual exclusivity, the child can eliminate the object (apple) and its color (red) as the meaning of 'round' and can try to analyze the object for some other property to label.

Right! You’ve said it . . . that’s what we elect governments for. To save ourselves the trouble of having to think. Well, we got what was coming to us! You duck out of all responsibility, you forfeit all right to scream when the balloon goes up . . . we’re like a load of kids! Silly little kids, playing in our playpens, while out there the psychopaths lay trails of dynamite and run around with lighted matches telling us it’s all as safe as houses and all for our own good, and still we say, oh, we must have leaders! There’s got to be someone in charge, someone to make the decisions, we can’t do it! In any other circumstances that would be labelled immaturity. We sit here and call it democracy!

I want to say something here, a lot of times, each of us may have been guilty of labeling someone materialistic because they have a high standard or expectation from those they want to relate with or deal with. In our minds, we are pissed off. How can they elevate the standards so high, so high that we are excluded, it must be selfish of them and in fact wicked. They are saying that we are not fit to be their friends, etc, etc. We spend so much energy trying to analyse and sometimes even dare to dictate to others what standards they should keep and maintain so we can fit in, I think with respect, it is a flawed way of thinking about the situation. It is a manner of thinking about the situation that may never solve of problems, our inadequacy. The government may set standards and regulations about how we ought t conduct our affairs in the public, but it will hardly, rarely and barely concern itself with the regulation of personal and private life, except those private actions that have or bring about public consequences. As such, each one of us has the power to make Rules and Regulations for the Admission of Persons into our lives, it is not in your capacity to cry when someone chooses to set his as high as the Eiffel tower Finally, instead of dying of envy, jealousy or resulting in character assassination, what you may do is spend time climbing the ladder of life, that you may become relevant to those you wish to dine and wine with. This is the hard part and most of us will rather squirm and cry-fowl. The rules of the game was set by nature, quitting, is a choice too.

How does someone know if they’re transgender?” “I like to think about it in terms of handedness,” Dr. Powers explains. “If I asked you to sign your name with your nondominant hand, it would feel weird. If I asked you to describe it to me, you’d probably say things like the pen doesn’t fit comfortably in my hand; or it’s awkward; or I have to try hard to make legible something that I can do with my other hand effortlessly. It feels forced. Even a kindergartner can tell you if they’re a righty or a lefty, even if they don’t have the words for it. It’s also true that while most people are righties, and a smaller sliver of the population are lefties, there are some people who can use either hand with equal facility. Years ago, if you were a lefty, teachers tried to break you into being right-handed. Eventually, someone realized that it’s perfectly okay to be left-handed. Right-handed people who don’t write with their left hand can still understand that some people might…even if they never do it themselves.” She looks at the jury. “This example is a really great way to understand what it means to be transgender. Everyone has a dominant gender identity. It’s not a preference, it’s not something you can change just because you feel like it—it’s just how you’re wired. Most people who are assigned male or female at birth feel their gender identity matches that label—they’re called cisgender. But transgender people know that being in the body they are in feels not quite right. Some know this when they’re very young. Some spend years feeling uncomfortable without really knowing why.

Will “trigger warnings” simply be a way of establishing a new secular index, a cautionary list of books and other works dangerous not for religious reasons but because they may offend or upset certain groups or individuals or that contain material which can be viewed as insensitive or inappropriate? Would Grapes of Wrath be upsetting to someone with bad memories of rural poverty? Will the near future necessitate warning labels in front of all published material? Will future editions of The Best American Essays, for example, include a trigger warning in front of each selection so readers can avoid material that might upset them? And will trigger warnings in themselves eventually cause upsetting reactions, just the words and images sufficing to evoke unpleasant memories or anxious responses?

FEAR—THE ROOT OF VIOLENCE Some say that there are only two things in the world: God and fear; love and fear are the only two things. There’s only one evil in the world, fear. There’s only one good in the world, love. It’s sometimes called by other names. It’s sometimes called happiness or freedom or peace or joy or God or whatever. But the label doesn’t really matter. And there’s not a single evil in the world that you cannot trace to fear. Not one. Ignorance and fear, ignorance caused by fear, that’s where all the evil comes from, that’s where your violence comes from. The person who is truly nonviolent, who is incapable of violence, is the person who is fearless. It’s only when you’re afraid that you become angry. Think of the last time you were angry. Go ahead. Think of the last time you were angry and search for the fear behind it. What were you afraid of losing? What were you afraid would be taken from you? That’s where the anger comes from. Think of an angry person, maybe someone you’re afraid of. Can you see how frightened he or she is? He’s really frightened, he really is. She’s really frightened or she wouldn’t be angry. Ultimately, there are only two things, love and fear. In this retreat I’d rather leave it like this, unstructured and moving from one thing to another and returning to themes again and again, because that’s the way to really grasp what I’m saying. If it doesn’t hit you the first time, it might the second time, and what doesn’t hit one person might hit another. I’ve got different themes, but they are all about the same thing. Call it awareness, call it love, call it spirituality or freedom or awakening or whatever. It really is the same thing.

HIYA, FITZY,” KEEFE SAID, LOOKING and sounding infinitely calmer than Sophie was feeling as he gave Fitz a quick chin nod and stood up to greet him—though he also shot Ro a look that said, Your punishment for not warning us will be LEGENDARY. “Didn’t know you’d be stopping by.” Fitz snorted. “Clearly.” Keefe smirked. “Wow, someone’s grumpy. Did Biana kick your butt in bramble again? He haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaates to lose,” he stage-whispered to Sophie. “But I guess you probably already know that about your boyfriend.” Sophie had a feeling he’d used the last word intentionally—and she chose to not correct him for the same reason, even though the label felt especially tenuous at the moment. “Or is it because Biana’s making you call her ‘Lady Biana’ now?” Keefe asked. “Your girlfriend’s totally been doing the same thing, in case you were wondering. Isn’t that right, Lady Fos-Boss?” Sophie scowled.

Ideas for Journal Entries You may find the following ideas useful in beginning your journal or keeping the entries varied. If you are not used to expressing your thoughts on paper, it may seem awkward at first. The longer you do it, the easier it will become. You’ll be amazed at the insight you gain into your life. -Write about your most memorable experience with social anxiety. How did you feel? What did you think? How did others react? Why do you think the event happened? -Write about situations that make you anxious every day. Record your thoughts, feelings, and actions. You may want to divide the page into columns with the headings: situation or event; negative thoughts; physical reactions; and actions. Following is an example of how this may look: Situation or Event Should I attend the first art class after school. Negative Thoughts I thought about skipping out. I was afraid of what people would think. I wanted to do a good job. Physical Reactions I felt a shortness of breath. In general, I was nervous and in a bad mood. Actions I took some deep breaths and visualized the class going well. Later, I became engrossed in my drawing. -Write about a time when you were pleased with how you acted in a social situation. -Identify times when anxiety symptoms kept you from doing something that you really wanted to do. How did you feel? What might have happened if you had not been afraid? -Write a letter to someone who made you feel bad about yourself. You aren’t going to show the letter to anyone, so feel free to write whatever you want. -Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter.

Why would everyone - in both the movie business and the audience - want to avoid the label "marriage"? Marriage was presumably everybody's business. People were either born into one, born outside of one, living in one, living outside of one, trying to woo someone into one, divorced from one, trying to get divorced from one, reading about one, dreaming about one, or just observing one from afar. For most people, it would be the central event - the biggest decision - of their lives. Marriage was the poor man's trip to Paris and the shopgirl's final goal. At the very least, it was a common touchstone. Unlike a fantasy film or a sci-fi adventure, a marriage story didn't have to be explained or defined. Unlike a western or a gangster plot, it didn't have to find a connection to bring a jolt of emotional recognition to an audience. Marriage was out there, free to be used and presented to people who knew what the deal was.

But the conversation that Alexander wants to have glosses over the fact that black men commit a hugely disproportionate number of crimes in the United States. The New Jim Crow is chock-full of data on the racial makeup of prisons, but you will search in vain for anything approaching a sustained discussion of black crime rates. To Alexander and those who share her view, the two are largely unrelated. Black incarceration rates, she wrote, result from “a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control.”6 The author seems reluctant even to acknowledge that black people behind bars have done anything wrong. In her formulation, blacks are simply “far more likely to be labeled criminals”7 and are as blameless as slaves in the antebellum South. “When we say someone was ‘treated like a criminal,’ what we mean to say is that he or she was treated as less than human, like a shameful creature,” Alexander wrote. “Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages.”8 Really?

Take the common Buddhist practice of “noting,” for example: practitioners learn to label their worries and feelings with a simple tag like “thinking” or “anger,” taking note of them mindfully without engaging them directly. In a 2007 study, the UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman showed thirty volunteers fear-provoking images and then asked them to note their feelings (“I feel afraid”) as he monitored their brain activity. Upon seeing the unpleasant images, the subjects’ amygdalae lit up at first, but the labeling process soon sparked activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, damping activity in the amygdala. Lieberman believes this mindful noting—the simple act of putting our feelings into words—helps the brain disambiguate our emotions and provide a level of detachment from them. “One of the ways labeling is useful is in talking with other people,” he told me. “If you can get someone to talk about their feelings, it’ll end up being beneficial to them in ways they may not realize.” (Writing about how we feel in a journal serves the same purpose; it helps us sort out emotions, like anxiety, on a deeper subconscious level.)

Speaking truth to bullshit and practicing civility start with knowing ourselves and knowing the behaviors and issues that both push into our own BS or get in the way of being civil. If we go back to BRAVING and our trust checklist, these situations require a keen eye on: 1. Boundaries. What’s okay in a discussion and what’s not? How do you set a boundary when you realize you’re knee-deep in BS? 2. Reliability. Bullshitting is the abandonment of reliability. It’s hard to trust or be trusted when we BS too often. 3. Accountability. How do we hold ourself and others accountable for less BS and more honest debate? Less off-loading of emotion and more civility? 4. Vault. Civility honors confidentiality. BS ignores truth and opens the door to violations of confidentiality. 5. Integrity. How do we stay in our integrity when confronted with BS, and how do we stop in the midst of our own emotional moment to say, “You know what, I’m not sure this conversation is productive” or “I need to learn more about this issue”? 6. Nonjudgment. How do we stay out of judgment toward ourselves when the right thing to do is say, “I actually don’t know much about this. Tell me what you know and why it’s important to you.” How do we not go into “winner/loser” mode and instead see an opportunity for connection when someone says to us, “I don’t know anything about that issue”? 7. Generosity. What’s the most generous assumption we can make about the people around us? What boundaries have to be in place for us to be kinder and more tolerant? I know that the practice of speaking truth to bullshit while being civil feels like a paradox, but both are profoundly important parts of true belonging. Carl Jung wrote, “Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” We are complex beings who wake up every day and fight against being labeled and diminished with stereotypes and characterizations that don’t reflect our fullness. Yet when we don’t risk standing on our own and speaking out, when the options laid before us force us into the very categories we resist, we perpetuate our own disconnection and loneliness. When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and even becoming our own wilderness, we feel the deepest connection to our true self and to what matters the most.

Kindness and helping others are good things. The world does not move forward without people who care, support, and step in when someone needs help. We all value kindness and speak highly of it. Yet when we ask for help ourselves and hear a refusal, disappointment often follows. Not always because the help was critical, but because we expected a ‘yes’. Asking for help and giving help are two different choices. Asking is our decision. Helping is always the other person’s decision. Problems begin when we mix the two and assume others should respond the way we would. That expectation quietly turns a simple request into emotional pressure. Help comes in many forms, money, advice, guidance, recommendations, suggestions, time, attention, and effort. What feels small to one person may cost another energy, responsibility, reputation, or risk. Some people hesitate because they have been taken advantage of before. Others fear being blamed if things do not work out. Sometimes a simple yes turns into repeated expectations they are not ready to carry. Many refusals have nothing to do with lack of kindness. People may want to help but cannot at that moment. Capacity changes with stress, work, family responsibilities, health, or mental load. A no often means “not now” or “not in this way,” not “I do not care.” At times, refusal also happens because the request was unclear or felt heavier than intended. There is another honest truth we avoid. Sometimes we ask for help when we should first try to handle things ourselves. Help is meant to support effort, not replace responsibility. When we take ownership first, any help we receive feels like support, not entitlement. And when help does not come, we are still not powerless. We still have ourselves. Asking for help should come from humility, not expectation, and without hidden intentions. Refusal should not be seen as bad intent, but met with understanding rather than emotion. When we respect other people’s limits, timing, experiences, and choices as much as our own needs, we stop taking things personally and stop labeling others as selfish or insensitive. Ask clearly, ask humbly, respect boundaries, and accept ‘no’ without resentment. When we remember that help is a favor, not a duty, help stays sincere, relationships stay balanced, and peace stays with us.

Ah, my friends, that innocent afternoon with Larry provoked me into thought in a way my own dicelife until then never had. Larry took to following the dice with such ease and joy compared to the soul-searching gloom that I often went through before following a decision, that I had to wonder what happened to every human in the two decades between seven and twenty-seven to turn a kitten into a cow. Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self: that sense of self which psychologists have been proclaiming we all must have. What if - at the time it seemed like an original thought - what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? - or, like the mastodon's huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being some-one represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles? He he he. What if? indeed: men must attempt to eliminate the error and develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus. I became tremendously excited with my thoughts: 'Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another' - why aren't they? At the age of three or four, children were willing to be either good guys or bad guys, the Americans or the Commies, the students or the fuzz. As the culture molds them, however, each child comes to insist on playing only one set of roles: he must always be a good guy, or, for equally compulsive reasons, a bad guy or rebel. The capacity to play and feel both sets of roles is lost. He has begun to know who he is supposed to be. The sense of permanent self: ah, how psychologists and parents lust to lock their kids into some definable cage. Consistency, patterns, something we can label - that's what we want in our boy. 'Oh, our Johnny always does a beautiful bower movement every morning after breakfast.' 'Billy just loves to read all the time...' 'Isn't Joan sweet? She always likes to let the other person win.' 'Sylvia's so pretty and so grown up; she just loves all the time to dress up.' It seemed to me that a thousand oversimplifications a year betrayed the truths in the child's heart: he knew at one point that he didn't always feel like shitting after breakfast but it gave his Ma a thrill. Billy ached to be out splashing in mud puddles with the other boys, but... Joan wanted to chew the penis off her brother every time he won, but ... And Sylvia daydreamed of a land in which she wouldn’t have to worry about how she looked . . . Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. Adults rule and they reward patterns. Patterns it is. And eventual misery. What if we were to bring up our children differently? Reward them for varying their habits, tastes, roles? Reward them for being inconsistent? What then? We could discipline them to be reliably various, to be conscientiously inconsistent, determinedly habit-free - even of 'good' habits.

A bad guy? He smothered a smile at the naiveté of the question. “Do you wish I was your heroic rescuer? That’s cute.” “You didn’t do any rescuing. That part was all me.” “I’m no one’s hero anyway. Most label me an abomination. It’s my lot in life. I do scary things beyond what you could even imagine. It’s why you’re best off if you get out of the car. Go your own way.” “You do scary things? Like pick up a girl and murder her on the side of the road?” “Are you frightened?” “I’m terrified,” she said sarcastically without a hint of fear. “You lumped us together earlier when you said ‘our kind,’ so I assume I also do bad things.” “You killed that guy in the club.” “You mean the one who planned to shoot you in the heart?” “I’m not saying I feel bad for him. Just pointing out murder’s not exactly a heroine move.” “So I’m a bad girl? You like that, don’t you?” She stared out the window, her lips compressed against a smile. “I like it.” Holy shit, she was incredible. He dealt with the deadliest of preternatural creatures on a daily basis. His servitude to the Crown required he hunt down and destroy paranormal threats bent on power, greed, or world domination. But he’d never encountered someone like her.

Meet people properly: It all starts with the introduction. Exchange contact information. Make sure you can pronounce everyone’s names. Find things you have in common: You can almost always find something in common with another person, and from there, it’s much easier to address issues where you have differences. Sports cut across boundaries of race and wealth. And if nothing else, we all have the weather in common. Try for optimal meeting conditions: Make sure no one is hungry, cold or tired. Meet over a meal if you can; food softens a meeting. That’s why they “do lunch” in Hollywood. Let everyone talk: Don’t finish someone’s sentences. And talking louder or faster doesn’t make your idea any better. Check egos at the door: When you discuss ideas, label them and write them down. The label should be descriptive of the idea, not the originator: “the bridge story” not “Jane’s story.” Praise each other: Find something nice to say, even if it’s a stretch. The worst ideas can have silver linings if you look hard enough. Phrase alternatives as questions: Instead of “I think we should do A, not B,” try “What if we did A, instead of B?” That allows people to offer comments rather than defend one choice. At

When I burst into the terminal, my eyes swept around, bouncing from person to person in the crowded, bustling space. My stomach fell a little when I didn’t see him, but I knew he probably couldn’t come this far. He was probably at baggage claim. I looked around for a sign to point me in the right direction and finally saw one labeled Baggage Claim with an arrow pointing off to the left. But I didn’t follow the arrow. My eyes fixed on someone standing beneath the sign. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his well-worn slouchy jeans. The relaxed action pulled the waistband low, highlighting his flat, narrow waist his Henley tee molded to. As usual, he was wearing his varsity jacket and his blond hair was a mess. My gaze locked on his sapphire-blue eyes and didn’t let go. His eyes, ohmigod, his eyes. The blue was so intense it served as an emergency brake on everything in my life. The second I looked at him, everything else came to a screeching halt. I no longer noticed the huge crowd rushing around. The anxiety-causing flight was just a distant memory, and the two weeks I spent longing for his touch became something I would live through ten times over just to be in this moment with him again. His lips pulled into a smile and the charm that oozed from every pore in his body made me almost lightheaded. Romeo pulled his hands out of his pockets and straightened, motioning for me. I rushed across the space separating us, my bag slapping against my side as I, for once, gracefully maneuvered around the people in my path. His chuckle brushed over me when I was just steps away, and I threw myself at him with a little sigh of relief. My legs wrapped around his waist and his arms locked around my back. I burrowed my head into his shoulder and inhaled deep, taking in his distinctive scent. “Rim,” he murmured, his voice low. I pulled back and his lips were on mine instantly. The moment our lips touched, he stilled, his body and mouth pausing against mine. Before I could wonder why, he muttered a garbled curse against my mouth and then his lips began to move. He kissed me softly but fiercely. There was so much possession in the way he kissed me, in the way his arms locked around me that my heart stuttered. I parted my lips so his tongue could sweep inside, and when my tongue met his, desire, hot and heavy, unfurled within me. Someone chuckled as they walked by, and Romeo retreated slightly, still letting his mouth linger on mine before completely pulling away. He rested his forehead against mine and he smiled. “I really fucking missed you.” “Me too,” I whispered. -Romeo & Rimmel

There is really only one question you ever need to direct at someone to work out whether or not they are a good person, and that is, with deliberate simplicity: Do you think you are a good person? And to this there is only one acceptable answer. People who are genuinely good, people who know about kindness, patience, forgiveness, compromise, apology and gentleness always, always answer: no. One cannot both be a good person and at the same time feel totally blameless and pure inside. Goodness is, one might say, the unique consequence of a keen awareness of one’s capacity to be bad: that is, to be thoughtless, cruel and self-righteous. The price of being genuinely good has to be a constant suspicion that one might be a monster – combined with a fundamental hesitation about labelling anyone else monstrous. Only properly bad people don’t lie awake at night worrying about their characters. It has generally never occurred to the most difficult or dangerous people on the planet that they might be awful. It is a grim paradox that the worst deeds that humans have ever been guilty of have been carried out by people with an easy conscience, people who felt they were definitely on the side of angels. The melancholy have advanced knowledge of their impurity, and are experts in their own sinfulness. They can’t forget how silly they have been at many moments and with what lack of thought they have treated others. This self-knowledge isn’t fun, but it keeps them very honest.

Love is not an agreement between two people/parties to exchange love between each other when the time comes that they need it. The “you love me and I love you” does not exist. Love is not an agreement. It’s not a label. Love is sharing. Love is caring. It’s when you tell your heart to let out the love stored within it and spread it to every grain of blood in your body. Then comes a time when love begins to overflow. Then you find someone to share it with. It’s not agreement. It is natural companionship. The source? It’s just simple self-love. The heart does what it loves. The mind can worry all it wants about the results/outcomes. The heart just follows the journey for the sake of the beautiful flow. All love is sourced from within. It can only be poured when the bodily cup is full. Love is divine. It is miraculous. It is instant. It is revolutionary. It has no ending when it starts. It’s a miracle that those who believe in magic receive. The light of true love can only be witnessed after a period of blackness and agony. When life’s purpose comes into fruition. The body and mind is just a cover. What is within, the soul, is eternal. It carries with it love wherever it goes. We are souls distracted by material obsessions. Love is spiritual. It makes you believe in God. Love is not a person. It is a spirit. When you connect with your soul, it attracts the spirit of love. You’re greater than the cover you’re in at the moment. You begin to understand that God is within and you are within everything you see. You begin to love God. You begin to love life. You begin to cherish your worth and all the obstacles that got you here. What was a little loneliness when it comes to this divine sensation of love spraying the heavenly gardens within?

Type II trauma also often occurs within a closed context - such as a family, a religious group, a workplace, a chain of command, or a battle group - usually perpetrated by someone related or known to the victim. As such, it often involves fundamental betrayal of the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator and within the community (Freyd, 1994). It may also involve the betrayal of a particular role and the responsibility associated with the relationship (i.e., parent-child, family member-child, therapist-client, teacher-student, clergy-child/adult congregant, supervisor-employee, military officer-enlisted man or woman). Relational dynamics of this sort have the effect of further complicating the victim's survival adaptations, especially when a superficially caring, loving or seductive relationship is cultivated with the victim (e.g., by an adult mentor such as a priest, coach, or teacher; by an adult who offers a child special favors for compliance; by a superior who acts as a protector or who can offer special favors and career advancement). In a process labelled "selection and grooming", potential abusers seek out as potential victims those who appear insecure, are needy and without resources, and are isolated from others or are obviously neglected by caregivers or those who are in crisis or distress for which they are seeking assistance. This status is then used against the victim to seduce, coerce, and exploit. Such a scenario can lead to trauma bonding between victim and perpetrator (i.e., the development of an attachment bond based on the traumatic relationship and the physical and social contact), creating additional distress and confusion for the victim who takes on the responsibility and guilt for what transpired, often with the encouragement or insinuation of the perpetrator(s) to do so.

The CEO answered by saying the bill was too high, that he’d pay half of it and that they would talk about the rest. After that, he stopped answering her calls. The underlying dynamic was that this guy didn’t like being questioned by anyone, especially a woman. So she and I developed a strategy that showed him she understood where she went wrong and acknowledged his power, while at the same time directing his energy toward solving her problem. The script we came up with hit all the best practices of negotiation we’ve talked about so far. Here it is by steps: A “No”-oriented email question to reinitiate contact: “Have you given up on settling this amicably?” A statement that leaves only the answer of “That’s right” to form a dynamic of agreement: “It seems that you feel my bill is not justified.” Calibrated questions about the problem to get him to reveal his thinking: “How does this bill violate our agreement?” More “No”-oriented questions to remove unspoken barriers: “Are you saying I misled you?” “Are you saying I didn’t do as you asked?” “Are you saying I reneged on our agreement?” or “Are you saying I failed you?” Labeling and mirroring the essence of his answers if they are not acceptable so he has to consider them again: “It seems like you feel my work was subpar.” Or “… my work was subpar?” A calibrated question in reply to any offer other than full payment, in order to get him to offer a solution: “How am I supposed to accept that?” If none of this gets an offer of full payment, a label that flatters his sense of control and power: “It seems like you are the type of person who prides himself on the way he does business—rightfully so—and has a knack for not only expanding the pie but making the ship run more efficiently.” A long pause and then one more “No”-oriented question: “Do you want to be known as someone who doesn’t fulfill agreements?” From my long experience in negotiation, scripts like this have a 90 percent success rate. That is, if the negotiator stays calm

-Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter. The following passage is an example of typical dialogue writing: A: Tomorrow is a big day. You have an interview at a college. How do you feel? B: I am really nervous. This is the first interview and I don’t know what it is going to be like. A: What are you afraid of? B: I’m afraid I’ll stutter and say something stupid. I’m worried the person will ask a question and I won’t know what to say. A: What do you want to discuss? B: I think it is good that I was on the basketball team for four years. That shows commitment and dedication. I also got decent grades and earned a blue ribbon at the science fair. A: What about your hobbies outside of school? B: I really like to read. I could mention that. I could talk also about the vacations my family has taken. They are pretty interesting. I enjoy my part-time retail job. A: It sounds like you do a lot. B: I guess I am good at organizing my life and accomplishing what needs to be done. Hey, that would sound good in an interview! -Try focused “freewriting.” Pick one topic, such as school, friends, or family, and write everything that comes to mind about that topic. Write for at least ten minutes or until you’re certain that you have run out of things to write. -Write your belief system. Start by writing “I believe…” at the top of a clean page. Then write whatever comes to mind. It may help to ask yourself questions when you get stuck such as “What do I believe about friendship?” “What is my personal style?” or “What are my gifts and abilities?” -Write about an event from your perspective, then write about the same event from someone else’s point of view. For example, if you had a hard time answering a question during class, write about how you felt, what you thought, and how you behaved. Next, pretend you are the teacher writing about the same event. What do you think he or she was thinking? How did he or she act? This exercise is a great way to show that there are multiple ways of seeing the same situation.

CHANGING YOUR LIFE TO ACCOMMODATE THE SIXTH SECRET The sixth secret is about the choiceless life. Since we all take our choices very seriously, adopting this new attitude requires a major shift. Today, you can begin with a simple exercise. Sit down for a few minutes and reassess some of the important choices you’ve made over the years. Take a piece of paper and make two columns labeled “Good Choice” and “Bad Choice.” Under each column, list at least five choices relating to those moments you consider the most memorable and decisive in your life so far—you’ll probably start with turning points shared by most people (the serious relationship that collapsed, the job you turned down or didn’t get, the decision to pick one profession or another), but be sure to include private choices that no one knows about except you (the fight you walked away from, the person you were too afraid to confront, the courageous moment when you overcame a deep fear). Once you have your list, think of at least one good thing that came out of the bad choices and one bad thing that came out of the good choices. This is an exercise in breaking down labels, getting more in touch with how flexible reality really is. If you pay attention, you may be able to see that not one but many good things came from your bad decisions while many bad ones are tangled up in your good decisions. For example, you might have a wonderful job but wound up in a terrible relationship at work or crashed your car while commuting. You might love being a mother but know that it has drastically curtailed your personal freedom. You may be single and very happy at how much you’ve grown on your own, yet you have also missed the growth that comes from being married to someone you deeply love. No single decision you ever made has led in a straight line to where you find yourself now. You peeked down some roads and took a few steps before turning back. You followed some roads that came to a dead end and others that got lost at too many intersections. Ultimately, all roads are connected to all other roads. So break out of the mindset that your life consists of good and bad choices that set your destiny on an unswerving course. Your life is the product of your awareness. Every choice follows from that, and so does every step of growth.

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. 4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. 6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.” 7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” 8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

to look at Louisa, stroked her cheek, and was rewarded by a dazzling smile. She had been surprised by how light-skinned the child was. Her features were much more like Eva’s than Bill’s. A small turned-up nose, big hazel eyes, and long dark eyelashes. Her golden-brown hair protruded from under the deep peak of her bonnet in a cascade of ringlets. “Do you think she’d come to me?” Cathy asked. “You can try.” Eva handed her over. “She’s got so heavy, she’s making my arms ache!” She gave a nervous laugh as she took the parcel from Cathy and peered at the postmark. “What’s that, Mam?” David craned his neck and gave a short rasping cough. “Is it sweets?” “No, my love.” Eva and Cathy exchanged glances. “It’s just something Auntie Cathy’s brought from the old house. Are you going to show Mikey your flags?” The boy dug eagerly in his pocket, and before long he and Michael were walking ahead, deep in conversation about the paper flags Eva had bought for them to decorate sand castles. Louisa didn’t cry when Eva handed her over. She seemed fascinated by Cathy’s hair, and as they walked along, Cathy amused her by singing “Old MacDonald.” The beach was only a short walk from the station, and it wasn’t long before the boys were filling their buckets with sand. “I hardly dare open it,” Eva said, fingering the string on the parcel. “I know. I was desperate to open it myself.” Cathy looked at her. “I hope you haven’t built up your hopes, too much, Eva. I’m so worried it might be . . . you know.” Eva nodded quickly. “I thought of that too.” She untied the string, her fingers trembling. The paper fell away to reveal a box with the words “Benson’s Baby Wear” written across it in gold italic script. Eva lifted the lid. Inside was an exquisite pink lace dress with matching bootees and a hat. The label said, “Age 2–3 Years.” Beneath it was a handwritten note:   Dear Eva, This is a little something for our baby girl from her daddy. I don’t know the exact date of her birthday, but I wanted you to know that I haven’t forgotten. I hope things are going well for you and your husband. Please thank him from me for what he’s doing for our daughter: he’s a fine man and I don’t blame you for wanting to start over with him. I’m back in the army now, traveling around. I’m due to be posted overseas soon, but I don’t know where yet. I’ll write and let you know when I get my new address. It would be terrific if I could have a photograph of her in this little dress, if your husband doesn’t mind. Best wishes to you all, Bill   For several seconds they sat staring at the piece of paper. When Eva spoke, her voice was tight with emotion. “Cathy, he thinks I chose to stay with Eddie!” Cathy nodded, her mind reeling. “Eddie showed me the letter he sent. Bill wouldn’t have known you were in Wales, would he? He would have assumed you and Eddie had already been reunited—that he’d written with your consent on behalf of you both.” She was afraid to look at Eva. “What are you going to do?” Eva’s face had gone very pale. “I don’t know.” She glanced at David, who was jabbing a Welsh flag into a sand castle. “He said he was going to be posted overseas. Suppose they send him to Britain?” Cathy bit her lip. “It could be anywhere, couldn’t it? It could be the other side of the world.” She could see what was going through Eva’s mind. “You think if he came here, you and he could be together without . . .” Her eyes went to the boys. Eva gave a quick, almost imperceptible nod, as if she was afraid someone might see her. “What about Eddie?” “I don’t know!” The tone of her voice made David look up. She put on a smile, which disappeared the