Love Deficit Quotes

It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self love deficit.

We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children's memories, the adventures we've had together in nature will always exist.

Don't be a reflection of your depression, your dark, or your ugly. Reflect what you want. Your light, your beauty, & your strength. Aspire for greatness - reflect who you are; not which deficits you maintain. Showcase the hidden treasures.

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

It is growing up different. It is extreme hypersensitivity. It is a bottomless pit of feeling you're failing, but three days later, you feel you can do anything, only to end the week where you began. It is not learning from your mistakes. It is distrusting people because you have been hurt enough. It is moments of knowing your pain is self inflicted, followed by blaming the world. It is wanting to listen, but you just can’t anymore because your life has been to full of people that have judged you. It is fighting to be right; so for once in your life someone will respect and hear you for a change. It is a tiring life of endless games with people, in order to seek stimulus. It is a hyper focus, so intense about what bothers you, that you can’t pay attention to anything else, for very long. It is a never-ending routine of forgetting things. It is a boredom and lack of contentment that keeps you running into the arms of anyone that has enough patience to stick around. It wears you out. It wears everyone out. It makes you question God’s plan. You misinterpret everything, and you allow your creative mind to fill the gaps with the same old chains that bind you. It narrows your vision of who you let into your life. It is speaking and acting without thinking. It is disconnecting from the ones you love because your mind has taken you back to what you can’t let go of. It is risk taking, thrill seeking and moodiness that never ends. You hang your hope on “signs” and abandon reason for remedy. It is devotion to the gifts and talents you have been given, that provide temporary relief. It is the latching onto the acceptance of others---like a scared child abandoned on a sidewalk. It is a drive that has no end, and without “focus” it takes you nowhere. It is the deepest anger when someone you love hurts you, and the greatest love when they don't. It is beauty when it has purpose. It is agony when it doesn’t. It is called Attention Deficit Disorder.

In the heat of an argument, my mother once told me, "Someday you can go to a therapist and tell him all about how your terrible mother ruined your life. But it will be your ruined life you're talking about. So make a life for yourself in which you can feel happy, and in which you can love and be loved, because that's what's actually important." You can love someone but not accept him; you can accept someone but not love him. I wrongly felt the flaws in my parents' acceptance as deficits in their love. Now, I think their primary experience was of having a child who spoke a language they'd never thought of studying.

What is perceived as normal. That makes it other people’s failings. Deficits. Not yours. Who the hell sets the standards, huh? Who gets to say how we are supposed to be? Or who we are supposed to be? And how dare anyone make you feel inadequate for being who you are? It’s not okay. It pisses me off.

It's all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self love deficit.

On Generosity On our own, we conclude: there is not enough to go around we are going to run short of money of love of grades of publications of sex of beer of members of years of life we should seize the day seize our goods seize our neighbours goods because there is not enough to go around and in the midst of our perceived deficit you come you come giving bread in the wilderness you come giving children at the 11th hour you come giving homes to exiles you come giving futures to the shut down you come giving easter joy to the dead you come – fleshed in Jesus. and we watch while the blind receive their sight the lame walk the lepers are cleansed the deaf hear the dead are raised the poor dance and sing we watch and we take food we did not grow and life we did not invent and future that is gift and gift and gift and families and neighbours who sustain us when we did not deserve it. It dawns on us – late rather than soon- that you “give food in due season you open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” By your giving, break our cycles of imagined scarcity override our presumed deficits quiet our anxieties of lack transform our perceptual field to see the abundance………mercy upon mercy blessing upon blessing. Sink your generosity deep into our lives that your muchness may expose our false lack that endlessly receiving we may endlessly give so that the world may be made Easter new, without greedy lack, but only wonder, without coercive need but only love, without destructive greed but only praise without aggression and invasiveness…. all things Easter new….. all around us, toward us and by us all things Easter new. Finish your creation, in wonder, love and praise. Amen.

Not that I'm bipolar, but that I'm two people, and not just two people, but two people at odds with each other. The mom and the kid, the homebody and the explorer, the strong and the weak, the logical and the emotional, the funny and the sad, the angry and the calm, the open and the closed, the loved and the hated, the hot and the cold, the alive and the dead, the beautiful and the ugly. It's exhausting. I. Am. Exhausting.

He downed the last of his coffee, carried his mug over to the pot, poured himself a refill, and returned to the table. Why, yes, thank you, I'd love some more coffee. Hmmm, Narcisstic Personality Disorder? Attention Deficit Disorder? Or just a typical male?

As parents who make every effort we can to raise our children in loving security, we do not need to feel more guilt than we already do. We need less guilt and more awareness of how the quality of the parent-child relationship can be used to promote our children’s emotional and cognitive development.

ADHD is really not so much a disorder of attention as it is a disorder of self-regulation,

Young children cannot possibly understand the motives of adults. It means little to a young child that the parent feels love for him if that parent keeps disappearing at almost any time. The child experiences a sense of abandonment, a subliminal knowledge that there are things in the world much more important to the parent than he, the child, that he is not worthy of the parent’s attention. He begins to feel, at first unconsciously, that there must be something wrong with him. He also begins to work too hard to get his needs met: demanding contact, acting out or trying to please the parent to gain approval and attention.

Having ADD makes life paradoxical. You can superfocus sometimes, but also space out when you least mean to. You can radiate confidence and also feel as insecure as a cat in a kennel. You can perform at the highest level, feeling incompetent as you do so. You can be loved by many, but feel as if no one really likes you. You can absolutely, totally, intend to do something, then forget to do it. You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but feel as if you can’t accomplish a thing.

If in the photograph the love may be seen in my mother’s face, her fear and worry are reflected in mine.

Although borderline mothers may love their children as much as other mothers, their deficits in cognitive functioning and emotional regulation create behaviors that undo their love. Borderline mothers have difficulty loving their children patiently and consistently. Their love does not endure misunderstandings or disagreements. They can be jealous, rude, irritable, resentful, arrogant, and unforgiving. Healthy love is based on trust and is the essence of emotional security.

it requires deep love to coax effective treatment from our mental healthcare system for a partner who is convinced that nothing can improve or, worse, that nothing is wrong, when it obviously is.

It takes confidence to be wholeheartedly intimate and passionately committed. Men who are emotionally unavailable have a self-confidence deficit, plain and simple. So man up and get rid of those insecurities or whatever it is that keeps you from opening up. Because if you're not man enough to talk about your own feelings, then you're not man enough to be in a committed relationship.

We must recognize that we do not have a two-party system in this country; we have one party, the big government party. There is a republican version that assaults our civil liberties and loves deficits and war, and a democratic version that assaults our commercial liberty and loves wealth transfers and taxes.

Despite these many factors, the impact of Mother is unparalleled. An attentive, capable, caring mother can help make up for many other handicaps, and the absence of such mothering is perhaps the greatest handicap of all, because when Mother is not doing her larger-than-life job as it needs to be done, children have significant deficits in their foundations.

Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I have accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

It's worth getting out of bed some mornings. And it's a pleasure, especially if the pale winter sun is out and shining, to delight with your lover in the urban gift of your favorite café. Fresh coffee, steaming croissants, and the Sunday papers. Ah! All the way to ours, Alice and I talked about love and how many people don't get any while others get a lot, and how that unfairness probably accounts for the federal deficit and crooked contracting practices, and so on.

It makes sense that people who repeatedly make poor decisions in choosing partners and have troubled relationships keep repeating their mistakes. Their motivations are as biological as they are emotional. The woman who can’t stop blaming her husband for every small infraction, the man who can’t stop trying to control his wife: their brains didn’t receive the love needed to foster the critical neural interconnections that create secure, loving attachment. They keep bumping up against the same neurobiological deficits, over and over again.

Stone and the dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness — we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge — there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied. The third prime requirement, a secure, safe and not overly stressed emotional atmosphere, is the one most likely to be disrupted in Western societies. The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb. For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. Now outside the matrix of the womb, the infant is nevertheless held close to the warmth of the maternal body from which nourishment continues to flow. Breast-feeding also deepens the mother’s feeling of connectedness to the baby, enhancing the emotionally symbiotic bonding relationship. No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. This security is more than the love and best possible intentions of the parents. It depends also on a less controllable variable: their freedom from stresses that can undermine their psychological equilibrium. A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. When interfered with, as it often is in our society, brain development is adversely affected.

and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

A woman's ability to achieve depends on childlessness or childcare. In America, where we don't believe in an underclass to do 'women's work', women themselves become the underclass. For love. Nobody doubts the love is real. It's for our children. But we are supposed to do it invisibly and never mention it. Alfred North Whitehead, who wasn't a woman after all, said that the truth of a society is what cannot be said. And women's work still cannot be said. It's called whining -- even by other women. It's called self-indulgence -- even by other women. Perhaps women writer are hated because abstraction makes oppression possible and we refuse to be abstract. How can we be? Our struggles are concrete: food, fire, babies, a room of one's own. These basics are rare -- even for the privileged. It is nothing short of a miracle every time a woman with a child finishes a book. Our lives -- from the baby to the writing desk -- are the lives of the majority of humanity: never enough time to think, eternal exhaustion. The cared-for male elite, with female slaves to tend their bodily needs, can hardly credit our difficulties as 'real'. 'Real' is the deficit, oil wars in the Middle East, or how much of our children's milk the Pentagon shall get. This is the true division in the world today: between those who carelessly say 'Third World' believing themselves part of the '¨First', and those who know they are the Third World -- wherever they live. Women everywhere are the 'Third World', In my country, where most women do not feel part of what matters, they are thirdly third, trapped in the myth of being 'first'.

The idea behind both concepts is that there must be an accounting, a ledger in the hearts and histories of a family. As if accepting a sum or taking a life will fill the void of the loss of a loved one." "It can't fill the void, but it can make things even," Adam said. "No. It does not. What you get is a deficit of two." "Then both are at an equal loss." Adam took a deep drag on his beer. "And how does this loss serve the memory of the loved one?" "It doesn't ... [v]engeance is selfish," Adam continued. "I've never tried to hide that." "Ah," Philip said. "Now we get to the heart of it. Adam, here is my question for you. Would you trade your claim to vengeance to set your brother free?" Talia watched the muscle twitch in Adam's jaw. It was a hard question, an impossible, painful question, especially after learning that Jacob had chosen his current state. Jacob had chosen to take the lives of his parents. He had reduced Adam's world to a haunted hotel with a group of mad scientists. Maybe she should say something. Change the subject. Seen any naked pictures of me today?

So the first thing is to create some space in the child’s heart of hearts for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything, or be any different, to earn that love—in fact, she cannot do anything, because the love cannot be won and cannot be lost. It is not conditional. It is completely independent of the child’s behavior. It is just there, regardless of which side the child is acting from, “good” or “bad.” The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved.

When children become teenagers, their feelings are often invalidated by others because they have a hard time expressing them. They can’t find the words to use so adults deem their emotions as a “stage of adolescence.” As a result, everything beautiful and raw about life is reduced to a phase they're supposed to grow out of. Although how often is our growth just abandonment? Some people don’t mature, they just run away from their problems faster than they used to and happen to age. We greatly underestimate the tragedy of leaving behind the unaddressed. Many of our most intuitive and sincere experiences are lost to time. It is one of life’s saddest deficits

Like any love-struck person, she runs around telling her friends and family what a terrific guy he is. After talking him up so much, she feels embarrassed to reveal his mistreatment when it begins, so she keeps it to herself for a long time. She assumes that his abusiveness comes from something that has gone wrong inside of him—what else is she to conclude, given how wonderful he was at first?—so she pours herself into figuring out what happened. She has a hard time letting go of her own dream, since she thought she had found a wonderful man. She can’t help wondering if she did something wrong or has some great personal deficit that knocked down their castle in the sky, so she tries to find the key to the problem inside of herself.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

Any relationship beyond acquaintanceship is composed of one to three qualities: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Simple friendship has one: intimacy. You can have other friends and you do not feel passionately about one another, or we are dealing with another animal. Most romantic relationships begin with a dollop of passion, often to the exclusion of anything else. The person in your arms is the best in the world, though you barely know him or her. You have never felt this way. Any gaps or deficits are temporarily puttied over by passion. When most people envision romantic love, this is where they stop. Romantic comedies but only rarely deal with washing your lover's dishes because they must be up early for work. No one wants to see the mundane when they can flip the channel to a desperate, emotionally-stunted frottage. The passion of infatuation triggers the release of addictive chemicals. We would rather get another hit than cope with the relative dullness of intimacy and commitment.

A dramatic illustration of how environment shapes personality is the story of the Gilmore family. On January 17, 1978, in Utah, the convicted double murderer Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, his unyielding refusal to appeal his death sentence having gained him a measure of international notoriety. The shattering story of his childhood, blighted by family violence, alcoholism and spite was chronicled later by his brother Mikal Gilmore in the memoir Shot in the Heart. Mikal, the youngest of four boys, was born when Gary was eleven years old. If children reared in the same family shared the same environment, the differences between siblings would have to be due to genetic inheritance. In the case of the Gilmores, it is easy to see why Mikal, born at a time when the family was enjoying a period of relative stability, would feel he had been brought up in a different world, why the misery of his childhood, as he put it, had been so radically different from the misery of his brothers’ childhood. Even without such vast chasms in experience, the environment of siblings is never the same. Environment has far greater impact on the structures and circuits of the human brain than was realized even a decade ago. It is what shapes the inherited genetic material. I believe it to be the decisive factor in determining whether the impairments of ADD will or will not appear in a child. Many variables will influence the particular environment a child experiences. Birth order, for one, automatically places siblings in dissimilar situations. The older sibling has to suffer the pain of seeing parental love and attention directed toward an intruder. The younger sibling may need to learn survival in an environment that harbors a stronger, potentially hostile rival, and never comes to know either the special status or the burden of being an only child. The full weight of unconscious parental expectations is far more likely to fall on the firstborn. Historical studies of birth order have established it as an important influence on the shaping of the personality, comparable with sex.

We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com

For a team facing a 12-run deficit, the game is all but over. Almost always. Three times in major league history, though, a club has come from down by a dozen to win. The Chicago White Sox were the first in 1911; fourteen years later, the Philadelphia Athletics duplicated the feat. Then seventy-six years would pass before it happened again. Enter the 2001 Cleveland Indians, battling for their sixth playoff spot in seven years. Hosting the red-hot Seattle Mariners, who would win a major league record 116 games that season, the Tribe found themselves trailing 12–0 after just three innings. In the middle of the seventh, Seattle led 14–2—at which point the Indians began their historic comeback. Scoring three in the seventh, four in the eighth, and five in the ninth, Cleveland forced extra innings. In the bottom of the eleventh, utility man Jolbert Cabrera slapped a broken-bat single to score Kenny Lofton for one of the more remarkable wins in the annals of baseball. On August 6, 2001, not even a 12-run deficit could stop the Cleveland Indians. Those of us who follow Jesus Christ can expect even greater victories. “I am convinced,” the apostle Paul wrote, “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39). If you’re deep in the hole today, take heart. As God’s child, you’re always still in the game. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. HEBREWS

Just how important a close moment-to-moment connection between mother and infant can be was illustrated by a cleverly designed study, known as the “double TV experiment,” in which infants and mothers interacted via a closed-circuit television system. In separate rooms, infant and mother observed each other and, on “live feed,” communicated by means of the universal infant-mother language: gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions. The infants were happy during this phase of the experiment. “When the infants were unknowingly replayed the ‘happy responses’ from the mother recorded from the prior minute,” writes the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, “they still became as profoundly distressed as infants do in the classic ‘flat face’ experiments in which mothers-in-person gave no facial emotional response to their infant’s bid for attunement.” Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. All that was lacking in the instant video replay, during which infants saw their mother’s face unresponsive to the messages they, the infants, were sending out. This sharing of emotional spaces is called attunement. Emotional stress on the mother interferes with infant brain development because it tends to interfere with the attunement contact. Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional selfregulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at that moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb. Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill. As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. The muscles of smiling are exactly the same in each case, but the signals that set the smile muscles to work do not come from the same centers in the brain. As a consequence, those muscles respond differently to the signals, depending on their origin. This is why only very good actors can mimic a genuine, heartfelt smile. The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. Infants, particularly sensitive infants, intuit the difference between a parent’s real psychological states and her attempts to soothe and protect the infant by means of feigned emotional expressions. A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. The emotional sensory radar of the infant has not yet been scrambled. It reads feelings clearly. They cannot be hidden from the infant behind a screen of words, or camouflaged by well-meant but forced gestures. It is unfortunate but true that we grow far more stupid than that by the time we reach adulthood.

Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.

Now, with all seven of these chakras revolving in the right direction with no blockages whatsoever, your kundalini would not be able to help itself from rising into that state of bliss, which it perceives above. Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.

It was discussed and decided that fear would be perpetuated globally in order that focus would stay on the negative rather than allow for soul expression to positively emerge. As people became more fearful and compliant, capacity for free thought and soul expression would diminish. There is a distinct inability to exert soul expression under mind control, and evolution of the human spirit would diminish along with freedom of thought when bombarded with constant negative terrors. Whether Bush and Cheney deliberately planned to raise a collective fear over collective conscious love is doubtful. They did not think, speak, or act in those terms. Instead, they knew that information control gave them power over people, and they were hell-bent to perpetuate it at all costs. Cheney, Bush, and other global elite ushering in the New World Order totally believed in the plan mapped out by artificial intelligence. They were allowing technology to dictate global control. “Life is like a video game,” Bush once told me at the rural multi-million dollar Lampe, Missouri CIA mind control training camp complex designed for Black Ops Special Forces where torture and virtual reality technologies were used. “Since I have access to the technological source of the plans, I dictate the rules of the game.” The rules of the game demanded instantaneous response with no time to consciously think and critically analyze. Constant conscious disruption of thought through television’s burst of light flashes, harmonics, and subconscious subliminals diminished continuity of conscious thought anyway, creating a deficit of attention that could easily be refocused into video game format. DARPA’s artificial intelligence was reliant on secrecy, and a terrifying cover for reality was chosen to divert people from the simple truth. Since people perceive aliens as being physical like them, it was decided that the technological reality could be disguised according to preconceptions. Through generations of genetic encoding dating back to the beginning of man, serpents incite an innate autogenic response system in humans to “freeze” in terror. George Bush was excited at the prospects of diverting people from truth by fear through perpetuating lizard-like serpent alien misconceptions. “People fear what they don’t know anyway. By compounding that fear with autogenic fear response, they won’t want to look into Pandora’s Box.” Through deliberate generation of fear; suppression of facts under the 1947 National Security Act; Bush’s stint as CIA director during Ford’s Administration; the Warren Commission’s whitewash of the Kennedy Assassination; secrecy artificially ensured by mind control particularly concerning DARPA, HAARP, Roswell, Montauk, etc; and with people’s fluidity of conscious thought rapidly diminishing; the secret government embraced the proverbial ‘absolute power that corrupts absolutely.’ According to New World Order plans being discussed at the Grove, plans for reducing the earth’s population was a high priority. Mass genocide of so-called “undesirables” through the proliferation of AIDS4 was high on Bush’s agenda. “We’ll annihilate the niggers at their source, beginning in South and East Africa and Haiti5.” Having heard Bush say those words is by far one of the most torturous things I ever endured. Equally as torturous to my being were the discussions on genetic engineering, human cloning, and depletion of earth’s natural resources for profit. Cheney remarked that no one would be able to think to stop technology’s plan. “I’ll destroy the planet first,” Bush had vowed.

The English love for China tea/brought deficit to the economy. What could we sell back?/Send in the army to deal some smack.

We spend our lives trying to fill the empty places in our souls that love never got to, where there wasn't enough water to reach our roots; its those deficits that often have the biggest impacts on us and that shape us the most. Whatever the void created in those early formative years, I think it's part of who I became as an adult

When children become teenagers, their feelings are often invalidated by others because they have a hard time expressing them. They can’t find the words to use so adults deem their emotions as a “stage of adolescence.” As a result, everything beautiful and raw about life is reduced to a phase they’ll grow out of. Although how often is our growth just abandonment? Some people don’t mature, they just run away from their problems faster than they used to and happen to age. We greatly underestimate the tragedy of leaving behind the unaddressed. Many of our most intuitive and sincere experiences are lost to time. It is one of life’s saddest deficits.

neurochemically, obsessive-compulsive disorder bears a conspicuous resemblance to falling in love. Scientists have scanned the brains of the pathologically obsessive and held them up next to brain scans of the love-struck, and the images turned colors in the same places. Doctors drew blood and found the same chemical imbalances—namely, a serotonin deficit.

Is there a different between Attention Deficit Disorder and daydreaming? He mused. Ah, there I go again. Focus,

I was done trying to pull love and meaning from the meager reserves of other people and my accomplishments. I was His beloved now, which meant I could soak up meaning and purpose from the limitless reservoir of the God who made me. The deficits which had always marked me were melting away.

76. Do you find you often get depressed after a success? 77. Do you hunger after myths and other organizing stories? 78. Do you feel you fail to live up to your potential? 79. Are you particularly restless? 80. Were you a daydreamer in class? 81. Were you ever the class clown? 82. Have you ever been described as “needy” or even “insatiable”? 83. Do you have trouble accurately assessing the impact you have on others? 84. Do you tend to approach problems intuitively? 85. When you get lost, do you tend to “feel” your way along rather than refer to a map? 86. Do you often get distracted during sex, even though you like it? 87. Were you adopted? 88. Do you have many allergies? 89. Did you have frequent ear infections as a child? 90. Are you much more effective when you are your own boss? 91. Are you smarter than you’ve been able to demonstrate? 92. Are you particularly insecure? 93. Do you have trouble keeping secrets? 94. Do you often forget what you’re going to say just as you’re about to say it? 95. Do you love to travel? 96. Are you claustrophobic? 97. Have you ever wondered if you’re crazy? 98. Do you get the gist of things very quickly? 99. Do you laugh a lot? 100. Did you have trouble paying attention long enough to read this entire questionnaire?

amusement park—not nearly so exciting and actually

Today, we have a surplus of sex in our culture but a deficit of true love and authentic sexual intimacy.

To the degree you experience a love deficit you will also manifest a leadership deficit.

you are here to transform fear into love; especially those who identify as Lightworkers, starting first with yourselves. We understand you have come up against an unkind world while operating out in the spiritual deficit, which results in fear and separation and all that springs from it. Though it is your nature to be kind and loving beings of compassion, it is also your nature to be warriors of light, though you can do this through gentle, energetic means.

God prepared a table before me in the presence of my insecurity, in the presence of my deficits, in the presence of my addictions, in the presence of my confusions, in the presence of what I have lost, in the presence of the threat that I won't make it, in the presence of my enemies, I am looking straight ahead.

If you tell a person that she has a mental disorder, you create a mental disorder—not only in the patient but in those who love her as well. The disorder is fear. Chronic fear holds more people back in life than any other mental infirmity. How ironic—and wrong—that the

And, absolutely, trust me I know, for many families, money is not something to scoff at, it is a primary concern thanks to its deficit. The same can be said, for other families, of love.

We don’t so much have fears to face – we have a deficit of self-love to make up. If we can find a way to feel more loveable, we might discover that the world also feels less fearsome.

When there’s no power in my life, instead of going from place to place, conference to conference trying to find it, I need to stop and get into the Word so that the Word can get in me. I’m lacking because there is a lack of seed growing in me. It begins with the Seed of the Word. If I am in a love deficit with the Father, turning to someone else to fill that deficit isn’t going to do it. There is a better way. Take ten passages about His love and get the Seed down into you. Then, in community, let that seed be watered by other people’s words falling on top of the written Word in you. Let the podcasts and conference speakers water what is already growing in you. Over time, you will find that you have fruit. You will begin to believe the Word. You will begin to shape your thoughts according to that Truth. You will have a new confidence, built not on faith, or circumstances, but on the very principles of the Word of God.

it was a relief to talk to Bezos. He had none of the awkward social deficits, and while he was more obviously venal, I appreciated that he never spewed the “I’m changing the world” craplets that had become de rigueur among the tech set. He had truckloads of enthusiasm about his business, but Bezos never was breathless about any of it.

Pure love will always add more to our lives despite how much giving it takes from our lives. So if we’re living with a deficit, we’re not loving with purity.

Over time, appreciation deficits set in. And these often become two-way: I think you don’t appreciate all I do and all I put up with, and you think I don’t appreciate whatever-it-is you do. Call it Mutual Appreciation Deficit Disorder (MADD), and you have the ingredients for a troubled working relationship. Second, appreciation has to come in a form the receiver values and hears clearly. Gary Chapman makes a similar point about love in his book The 5 Love Languages. Some of us take in love through words (“I love you”), while others hear it more clearly through acts of service, quality time, physical contact, or gifts.

Further Reading For the Children’s Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life by Julie Bogart The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids by Sarah Mackenzie Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education by Susan Wise Bauer A Gracious Space: Daily Reflections to Sustain Your Homeschooling Commitment by Julie Bogart Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakable Peace by Sarah Mackenzie Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life by Peter Gray Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art and Science of Falling in Love with Nature by Scott D. Sampson Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World by Ben Hewitt Project-Based Homeschooling: Mentoring Self-Directed Learners by Lori Pickert Let’s Play Math: How Families Can Learn Math Together—and Enjoy It by Denise Gaskins The Art of Self-Directed Learning: 23 Tips for Giving Yourself an Unconventional Education by Blake Boles Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type by Isabel Briggs Meyers and Peter B. Myers

There is an entire psychological substructure that, due to the fall, is a near-constant manufacturing of relational leveraging, fear-stuffing, nervousness, score-keeping, neurotic controlling, anxiety-festering silliness that is not something we say or even think so much as something we exhale. You can smell it on people, though some of us are good at hiding it. And if you trace this fountain of scurrying haste, in all its various manifestations, down to the root, you don’t find childhood difficulties or a Myers-Briggs diagnosis or Freudian impulses. You find gospel deficit. You find lack of felt awareness of Christ’s heart. All the worry and dysfunction and resentment are the natural fruit of living in a mental universe of law. The felt love of Christ really is what brings rest, wholeness, flourishing, shalom—that existential calm that for brief, gospel-sane moments settles over you and lets you step in out of the storm of of-works-ness.

Mudie's insistence on the three-volume format was undoubtedly responsible for the verbosity of many nineteenth-century novels, as authors went to extraordinary efforts to pad their texts to the required length. While a seasoned professional like Anthony Trollope mastered the required skill, many struggled to maintain inspiration and dramatic tension for the required 200,000 words, 66,000 words per volume. If we wonder why so many nineteenth-century novels lose themselves in a convoluted (though chaste) love story between two marginal characters in the novel's middle passage, we should blame Charles Edward Mudie: this was the problem of the difficult second volume. If all else failed and authors acme in short, publishers resorted to larger typefaces and wide margins to disguise the deficit.

It's worth getting out of bed some mornings. And it's a pleasure, especially if the pale winter sun is out and shining, to delight with your lover in the urban gift of your favorite café. Fresh coffee, steaming croissants, and the Sunday papers. Ah! All the way to ours, Alice and I talked about love and how many people don't get any while others get a lot, and how that unfairness probably accounts for the federal deficit and crooked contracting practices, and so on.

It's not Attention Deficit Disorder, I'm just not listening to you.

The call for Christians is not to be the best version of their personality type, but to be like Christ. No matter what our natural inclinations, strengths, or deficits may be, we are all called to live holy lives. We are all to repent sin. We are all to be obedient. No quirk or characteristic makes us exempt from the standards God has set for us.

I can relate to that. People have made me feel the same way. Maybe that’s why I was attracted to you. I knew everything you are was more than enough. You are true abundance, so I could never be in a deficit when I’m with you. So thank you, because I needed the way you make me feel, too.

Extreme flight types are like machines with the switch stuck in the “on” position. They are obsessively and compulsively driven by the unconscious belief that perfection will make them safe and love-able. They rush to achieve. They rush as much in thought [obsession] as they do in action [compulsion]. As children, flight types variably respond to their family trauma on a hyperactive continuum. The flight defense continuum stretches between the extremes of the driven “A” student and the ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder] dropout running amok. Flight types relentlessly flee the inner pain of their abandonment with the symbolic flight of constant busyness.

The manifest world is telling us what to do, with increasingly obvious signals; we need only look at our codes. Symptoms are signals. We are becoming through technology increasingly adept at reading and responding to signals; alas, due to the perverse prevailing ideology, we are ignoring the most important messages. The people that currently have power are tuned in on the wrong side of Solzhenitsyn’s line, temporarily forgetting that they are divinely connected. Hence ecological meltdown. The obvious signals that we need to switch to different energy systems are being ignored because they’re watching another channel, where the moot, outdated signal of individualistic self-advancement is being bombastically broadcast. Now is the time to change channels. Where now can we feel this connection in our pre-packed and prescriptive lives? When are we supposed to have time amidst the deadening thud of our futile duties? “You’ll find God among the poor,” they say. Is that true anymore? Is the connection between poverty and divinity simply a panacea for the world’s destitute, an assurance that they’ll be rewarded in the hereafter? Or does a material deficit provide space for God? My love of God elevates the intention of this book beyond the dry and admirable establishment of collectivized communities. I am enraptured by the magnetic pull of evolution: What is this energy that heals the body and escalates one cell to two, that repairs and creates and calculates in harmony with environment, outside of time? Where is evolution trying to go? Evolutionary psychologists would likely say the imposition of an anthropocentric concept like “trying” or “intending” is naïve, but I’m not going to ask one, they get enough airtime, the killjoys. I remain uncharmed by the incessant rationalization that requires the spirit’s capitulation. The infusion of the scientific with the philosophical is materialism. The manifesto for our salvation is not in this sparse itinerary. This all encompassing realm, this consciousness beyond mind, cannot be captured with language any more than you can appreciate Caravaggio by licking the canvas or Mozart by sniffing the notes on a staff.

His family took up twenty tables while my family gook up four. That should have told me everything. There were clashes over invitation wording and menu planning, religion and money, of course money. Clashes that indicated future classes, but Bo and I were young and hopeful and in love, both looking for something in the other person we hoped would make up for our own deficits, wide gaping holes that were far too cavernous to fill, but who knows that at twenty-vie? Who knows that ever?

This troubles me not intellectually but spiritually. Spirituality ought not to be ethereal or insubstantial but pragmatic and active. The reason I feel optimistic in such a superficially gloomy and apocalyptic climate is I know that there are wonderful possibilities for our species that we are only just beginning to reconsider. When the physicist speaks of the expanding universe with atheistic wonder, he is feeling the same transcendent pull that Rumi describes: Do you know what you are? You are a manuscript of a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. This universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that. Rumi was a Sufi mystic, though I imagine if you don’t know who Rumi was, the addition of the definition “Sufi mystic” isn’t tremendously helpful. “Who is Alan Devonshire?” “He had a great left peg but dodgy knees.” “Oh. Thank you for clarifying.” The manifest world is telling us what to do, with increasingly obvious signals; we need only look at our codes. Symptoms are signals. We are becoming through technology increasingly adept at reading and responding to signals; alas, due to the perverse prevailing ideology, we are ignoring the most important messages. The people that currently have power are tuned in on the wrong side of Solzhenitsyn’s line, temporarily forgetting that they are divinely connected. Hence ecological meltdown. The obvious signals that we need to switch to different energy systems are being ignored because they’re watching another channel, where the moot, outdated signal of individualistic self-advancement is being bombastically broadcast. Now is the time to change channels. Where now can we feel this connection in our pre-packed and prescriptive lives? When are we supposed to have time amidst the deadening thud of our futile duties? “You’ll find God among the poor,” they say. Is that true anymore? Is the connection between poverty and divinity simply a panacea for the world’s destitute, an assurance that they’ll be rewarded in the hereafter? Or does a material deficit provide space for God? My love of God elevates the intention of this book beyond the dry and admirable establishment of collectivized communities. I am enraptured by the magnetic pull of evolution: What is this energy that heals the body and escalates one cell to two, that repairs and creates and calculates in harmony with environment, outside of time? Where is evolution trying to go? Evolutionary psychologists would likely say the imposition of an anthropocentric concept like “trying” or “intending” is naïve, but I’m not going to ask one, they get enough airtime, the killjoys. I remain uncharmed by the incessant rationalization that requires the spirit’s capitulation. The infusion of the scientific with the philosophical is materialism. The manifesto for our salvation is not in this sparse itinerary. This all encompassing realm, this consciousness beyond mind, cannot be captured with language any more than you can appreciate Caravaggio by licking the canvas or Mozart by sniffing the notes on a staff.

ADD people love bottom lines,” I answered, laughing. “It’s always, ‘Get to the point’; ‘What’s the next show?’; ‘Where’s the beef?’ ” “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I’m not big on scenery. I want to get there. Is that bad?

Human beings are not self-sufficient as individuals. We are born naked against the elements and helpless in ourselves; we are dependent upon others from the beginning, and apart from them we would not last our first day on earth. This dependency continues throughout our lives, since none of us can or should acquire all the skills necessary to grow our own food, make our own shoes, provide our own education, etc. We are by nature social beings and thrive only in community. Therefore, the purpose of government is to provide the conditions under which all the other communities that make up the social fabric can flourish. First and foremost among these other communities is the community of the family, the one that first calls us into being through an act of love and gives us the gifts that will form us—not only the material gifts of food, clothing, and shelter, but also the gifts of language, of culture, of our first experience of love and belonging, and, most importantly, the gift of a name, a name that ties us to family but is uniquely ours, the name that lets us know that we are both part of something and unique beings.

Parents are responsible for the development of our personal value. Peck shares a basic law of child development: “Wherever there is a major deficit in parental love, the child will, in all likelihood, respond to the deficit by assuming itself to be the cause of the deficit, thereby developing an unrealistically negative self-image.”7 If we start life with a deep sense of self-doubt due to poor parenting, we either become underachievers or overachievers. If we are the overachiever, which I am, we achieve in some way under the guise that, if I achieve enough, then maybe I will become important to my parents; maybe they will see me and validate my worth. I can say in my case, not my brother’s, that the more I have succeeded, the more my parents have loathed me. Yet, I have heard both of my parents say, “I must have done something right because you and your brother are both successful.” It’s surreal to me that instead of seeing our accomplishments for what they are—ways to secure their love or establish our independence from them—they take personal parenting credit for our accomplishments.

When we choose who we love based on our financial situation (out of fear of deficit) rather than our heart’s desire, we compromise our sensuality.

debt. Perhaps we should start by giving it another name. The national debt is nothing like household debt, so using the word debt just leads to confusion and unnecessary angst. We could just refer to it as part of our net money supply. I doubt yellow dollars will catch on, but hey, it’s worth a shot! In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet famously inquires, “What’s in a name?” She wasn’t troubled when she learned that Romeo was a Montague. For her, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Love, as they say, is blind. On the political stage, words matter. It’s time to come up with a new name for these interest-bearing dollars.

But belief in the Victorian, Enlightenment-based ideal of an omnipotent, autonomous willpower, overseeing and in control of a mind transparent to itself, has generally faded. It reappears from time in slogans, political (as in Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No”) and commercial (as in Nike’s “Just do it!”). But the “just” in these slogans is a form of magical denial that the powerful physiological and psychological grip of drug addiction and deficits in athletic constitution and training can all be overcome by simple exertion of the will. The other end of the continuum, the opposite of the traditional belief in the omnipotent will, is the doctrine of passive victimization, in evidence in television spectacles in which perpetrators of heinous crimes exonerate themselves by revealing their own past victimization. Not only are we not in control, they seem to be saying, we are pawns of what was done to us in our distant personal pasts. Psychotherapy is often misused in the service of this sort of self-exoneration.

Remember: ADHD deficits can include failure to initiate and problems with procrastinating, prioritizing, and following through.

Indeed, to the untrained eye, ADHD symptoms do resemble human behaviors, albeit in more extreme form. Other factors fog the issues, too. That’s why it is critical, if you suspect ADHD, to seek a trained eye.

I think people come to words much as lovers get together. They stumble onto each other, at the oddest of times, in the strangest of places. They will meet in an empty laundromat on a rainy Sunday afternoon, or they will catch each other’s eyes across a ballroom dance floor in the middle of a wedding waltz. They will meet without appointment and strike up a relationship without an agenda. There may be a long courtship or a whirlwind romance. There may be protracted avoidance, even what looks like a phobia, as in Karl’s case, or there may be an instant avidity, what amounts to love at first sight. Some carry on a kind of epistolary relationship with words, expressing their feelings through the formal prose of elegant notes, while others jump at words and bark them out at the world in the immediate poetry of certain street-corner vendors. Some slap their words up on posters on telephone poles, while others keep them in reserve, like a pistol concealed in a pocketbook. Some read haltingly, like the nervous lover, hat in hand, while others seem born to orate. We all woo language differently, and language grants us her favors in different ways. Sometimes the relationship takes off, although it is rare there is a ride without bumps. While utterly beautiful, endlessly varied, and thoroughly transfixing, language can also be frustrating, confusing, exasperating, and unforgiving.

You can superfocus sometimes, but also space out when you least mean to. You can radiate confidence and also feel as insecure as a cat in a kennel. You can perform at the highest level, feeling incompetent as you do so. You can be loved by many, but feel as if no one really likes you. You can absolutely, totally, intend to do something, then forget to do it. You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but feel as if you can’t accomplish a thing.

love felt by the parent does not automatically translate into loving experienced by the child.

What his case and others (just google “category-specific semantic deficits” to find them) suggest is that there may be a kind of order-creating mechanism inside of us—that we come into the world predisposed to acquire a very specific set of beliefs about how to sort nature. Who belongs together, who belongs apart, who belongs on top. Other studies have shown how early we seem to obey these intuitive rules: at four months old we begin differentiating between cats and dogs, for example. The fact that this intuitive order may be a part of our wiring does not mean it is truth. It means it is useful. It means that it has served our species well over the generations, helped us to so successfully navigate and exploit the Chaos around us.

Grief is the debt we pay to live and to love and to chase the stuff that gives us meaning. Every breath is a debt collection on a collapsing hallway of deficit. You are a life on loan.

Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tin foil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me. I was the one with an uncut cow's tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates' Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meet like garlic roasted to paste. I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Conde Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of those inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria. I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called 'breakfast for dinner.' And the only reason they were right and I was wrong was that it was their country. The problem with my desire to pass for native was that everything in the tinfoil was so f*****g good. When the world thinks of Soviet food, it thinks of all the wrong things. Though it was due to incompetence rather than ideology, we were local, seasonal, and organic long before Chez Panisse opened its doors. You just had to have it in a home instead of a restaurant, like British cooking after the war, as Orwell wrote. For me, the food also had cooked into it the memory of my grandmother's famine; my grandfather's black-marketeering to get us the 'deficit' goods that, in his view, we deserved no less than the political VIPs; all the family arguments that paused while we filled our mouths and our eyes rolled back in our heads. Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency - and it was how you showed loved. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what it fed, how to retain a connection to my past without being consumed by its poison.

I had no choice but to understand that people can demean and hit you and in their better moments love you, at once be a mess themselves and carry a deep pride in your strange togetherness. They suffered from weakness of character, yes-just like every other person, in every other income bracket. What really put shame on us wasn't our moral deficit. It was our money deficit.

But what about the fact that Scripture commands us to love each other? Doesn’t that mean we need love? Not necessarily. It means that we need to love rather than that we must be filled with love (and meaning, significance, and so on) due to a psychological deficit. Those who withhold love will be withered and empty, with life slipping out of them. The truth is that we were created in love and are now sustained by God’s patient love, and we bring glory to God by imitating his persistent love. We love not because people have psychological deficits but because God first loved us. The image of God in us is not about psychological need; it is about the abundance of gifts that God has given his people.