Neglect Relationship Quotes

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Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not 'smash their mommy' and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.
bell hooks
The abusive man’s high entitlement leads him to have unfair and unreasonable expectations, so that the relationship revolves around his demands. His attitude is: “You owe me.” For each ounce he gives, he wants a pound in return. He wants his partner to devote herself fully to catering to him, even if it means that her own needs—or her children’s—get neglected. You can pour all your energy into keeping your partner content, but if he has this mind-set, he’ll never be satisfied for long. And he will keep feeling that you are controlling him, because he doesn’t believe that you should set any limits on his conduct or insist that he meet his responsibilities.
Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men)
For each of these women, the fear of the unknown — of leaving a marriage and casting off alone — may have bound them to a marriage where there is insensitivity, neglect, or even outright abuse. People learn intimacy at home, and when those early standards are set too low, a wife may second-guess her judgment about when and whether she should leave.
Anne Michaud (Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Eight Political Wives)
THE WEATHER OF LOVE Love Has a way of wilting Or blossoming At the strangest, Most unpredictable hour. This is how love is, An uncontrollable beast In the form of a flower. The sun does not always shine on it. Nor does the rain always pour on it Nor should it always get beaten by a storm. Love does not always emit the sweetest scents, And sometimes it can sting with its thorns. Water it. Give it plenty of sunlight. Nurture it, And the flower of love will Outlive you. Neglect it or keep dissecting it, And its petals will quickly curl up and die. This is how love is, Perfection is a delusional vision. So love the person who loves you Unconditionally, And abandon the one Who only loves you Under favorable Conditions.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
In any relationship, do what is right; not what you want to do. Eliminate selfishness. Eliminate neglect.
Bridget Earl Pehrson
In love, treat your relationship as if you are growing the most beautiful flower. Keep watering it, tend to its roots, give it lots of sunlight, and always make sure the petals are full of color and are never curling. Once you neglect your plant, it will die, as will your relationship.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Please don’t hate you??!! I hate that I love you. Loving you made me waste a year of my life. Loving you made me be passionate about nothing but you. Loving you made me take risks I never would have otherwise. Loving you made me give it up to you. Loving you made me neglect my parents and Amy. Loving you made me not care that my grandma just died. Loving you made me turn out bitter and hopeless like her. Loving you made me hate myself for being dumped by you. Loving you made me deluded, irrational, inconsiderate, and a liar. And because I love you, you’re always going to haunt me.
Daria Snadowsky (Anatomy of a Boyfriend (Anatomy, #1))
LOVE IS A FLOWER Treat your relationship As if you are growing The most beautiful sacred flower. Keep watering it, Tend to the roots, And always make sure The petals are full of color And are never curling. Once you neglect your plant, It will die, As will your relationship.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
What marriage offers - and what fidelity is meant to protect - is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence obviously cannot be continuous. No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments, which give us the highest joy we can know; that of union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment)... To forsake all others does not mean - because it cannot mean - to ignore or neglect all others, to hide or be hidden from all others, or to desire or love no others. To live in marriage is a responsible way to live in sexuality, as to live in a household is a responsible way to live in the world. One cannot enact or fulfill one's love for womankind or mankind, or even for all the women or men to whom one is attracted. If one is to have the power and delight of one's sexuality, then the generality of instinct must be resolved in a responsible relationship to a particular person. Similarly, one cannot live in the world; that is, one cannot become, in the easy, generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a "world citizen." There can be no such think as a "global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality. (pg.117-118, "The Body and the Earth")
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
Too often, we therapists neglect our personal relationships. Our work becomes our life.
Irvin D. Yalom (The Gift of Therapy)
To have a caring and committed heart toward someone—a heart so firm in its devotion as to sooner stop beating than neglect the object of its desire despite the person's state of health, appearance, reputation, finances, troubles, or challenges—that, dear world, is love. It is a rare find.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, & Grumblings for Every Day of the Year)
Leaving - and healing from - an abusive relationship is extremely stressful. Your body may show the signs of the stress. While dealing with your emotions may make sense to you, you may neglect your physical health, not realizing how much your physical health affects your emotional and spiritual health.
Caroline Abbott (A Journey to Healing After Emotional Abuse)
Internalizers are highly perceptive and extremely sensitive to other people. Because of their strong need to connect, growing up with an emotionally immature parent is especially painful for them. Internalizers have strong emotions but shrink from bothering other people, making them easy for emotionally immature parents to neglect. They develop a role-self that’s overly focused on other people, along with a healing fantasy that they can change others’ feelings and behaviors toward them. They get by on very little support from others and end up doing too much emotional work in their relationships, which can lead to resentment and exhaustion.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
Treat your relationship as if you are growing the most beautiful sacred flower. Keep watering it, tend to the roots, and always make sure the petals are full of color and are never curling. Once you neglect your plant, it will die, as will your relationship.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making a commitment is it. Finish. You think it sets like a concrete platform and it'll take any strain you want to put on it. You're committed. You don't have to prove anything. In fact you can afford a little neglect, indulge in a little bit of sarcasm here and there, isolate yourself when you want to. Underneath it's concrete for life. I'm a cow in some ways, but you're an idiot.
Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing)
When he had promised himself that he wouldn't try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral.
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
You taught me what it means to fight for what you love. You showed me great endurance in a manner that was unusual to me. You fought for my heart until all the fight in you was gone without neglecting your brain. You displayed to me what unconditional love should look like, if I were to stare at it in a mirror. You loved me even on the days I found it difficult to even love myself. You scooped down to help me up at my lowest. You chained your heart to mine and stayed by my side even when all the signs gave you red lights about continuing our relationship. You remained loyal, even when I became disloyal, and fulfilled the belief that many men are dogs. You hung on longer than I expected, Loved me more than I could ever imagine. Some may have called you foolish for staying, but you showed me an aspect of love I’ve only read about in 1 Corinthians 13.
Pierre Alex Jeanty (To the Women I Once Loved)
Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.
Mikita Brottman
We forget in order to survive our childhoods, when we are totally dependent on our parents' goodwill; but to recover from such childhoods, we must begin by remembering-the bad and the good.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
The most traumatic aspects of all disasters involve the shattering of human connections. And this is especially true for children. Being harmed by the people who are supposed to love you, being abandoned by them, being robbed of the one-on-one relationships that allow you to feel safe and valued and to become humane—these are profoundly destructive experiences. Because humans are inescapably social beings, the worst catastrophes that can befall us inevitably involve relational loss. As a result, recovery from trauma and neglect is also all about relationships—rebuilding trust, regaining confidence, returning to a sense of security and reconnecting to love. Of course, medications can help relieve symptoms and talking to a therapist can be incredibly useful. But healing and recovery are impossible—even with the best medications and therapy in the world—without lasting, caring connections to others.
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
The Bible says you should live “casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you” (1 Pet. 5:7). God doesn’t want you to neglect your cares; He wants to help you take care of them. He wants to give you wisdom about how to handle them—whether it is a relationship, a project at work, volunteering at your kids’ school, or your passion to see a world issue resolved justly. He wants to give you strength to handle it. He has the wisdom you need to make it right. He wants to see you succeed so that He can be glorified in you.
Cindy Trimm (The Prayer Warrior's Way: Strategies from Heaven for Intimate Communication with God)
We spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply where we simply did not know what to do.
bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
Too many Americans are spurred to achieve, rather than to attach.
Thomas Lewis (A General Theory of Love (Vintage))
Survivors of trauma may have difficulty initiating relationships ...
Asa Don Brown (The Effects of Childhood Trauma on Adult Perception and Worldview)
The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.
Allen Wheelis (How People Change: A Serious Psychological Work on Human Transformation)
Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma with Award-Winning Harvard Business Review Article ?How Will You Measure Your Life?? (2 Items))
Many neglected and abused children grow up to be adults who are afraid to take risks of striking out on their own. Many will remain dependent on their abusive parents and unable to separate from them. Others leave their abusive parents only to attach themselves to a partner who is controlling.
Beverly Engel (The Nice Girl Syndrome: Stop Being Manipulated and Abused -- And Start Standing Up for Yourself)
You start to see that you’ve never behaved like this in any other relationship, and it’s not because they were special. It’s because they were actively working against you from the moment they chose you. You look back at all of the things that once made you feel paranoid, now able to see that every instance of abuse & neglect was calculated and intentional. And finally, you come to the horrifying realization that the love of your life—the person you trusted with all your heart—had set you up for failure since the very beginning.
Peace (Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, & Other Toxic People)
How can I respect a person who neglected me on purpose? To earn respect, you have to give it.” ~Love is respect ♥~
Charlena E. Jackson (In Love With Blindfolds On)
During and after the relationship, you’re a victim of abuse. You were manipulated, insulted, degraded, belittled, and neglected. Full responsibility for this goes to the psychopath.
Peace (Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, & Other Toxic People)
Delayed arrogance is common in sociopaths. When you first meet, they’ll seem unusually innocent, humble, childlike, and thoughtful. But as time goes by, they inevitably transform into a monster: manipulative, arrogant, and neglectful.
Jackson MacKenzie (Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People)
When we recognize that we are not responsible for our childhood deprivations, and that we are entitled to feel anger (but not to act on it - awareness is not a license to kill), then we are able to let go of that anger and not be controlled by it.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
It is not easy to get rid of weeds; but it is easy, by a process of neglect, to ruin your food crops and let them revert to their primitive state of wildness. [...] In political civilization, the state is an abstraction and the relationship of men utilitarian. Because it has no roots in sentiments, it is so dangerously easy to handle. Half a century has been enough for you to master this machine; and there are men among you, whose fondness for it exceeds their love for the living ideals which were born with the birth of your nation and nursed in your centuries. It is like a child who in the excitement of his play imagines he likes his playthings better than his mother.
Rabindranath Tagore (The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol 3: A Miscellany)
In addition, they are secretly convinced that more self-sacrifice and emotional work will eventually transform their unsatisfying relationships. So the greater the difficulties, the more they try. If this seems illogical, remember that these healing fantasies are based on a child’s ideas about how to make things better. As children, internalizers tend to take on the role-self of the rescuer, feeling a responsibility to help others even to the point of self-neglect. Their healing fantasy always involves the idea It’s up to me to fix this. What they can’t see is that they’ve taken on a job nobody has ever pulled off: changing people who aren’t seeking to change themselves.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
When considering a new relationship of any kind, practice the Rule of Threes regarding the claims and promises a person makes, and the responsibilities he or she has. Make the Rule of Threes your personal policy. One lie, one broken promise, or a single neglected responsibility may be a misunderstanding instead. Two may involve a serious mistake. But three lies says you're dealing with a liar, and deceit is the linchpin of conscienceless behavior. Cut your losses and get out as soon as you can. Leaving, though it may be hard, will be easier now than later, and less costly. Do not give your money, your work, your secrets, or your affection to a three-timer. Your valuable gifts will be wasted. 4.
Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door)
Abandonment is at the core of addictions. Abandonment causes deep shame. Abandonment by betrayal is worse than mindless neglect. Betrayal is purposeful and self-serving. If severe enough, it is traumatic. What moves betrayal into the realm of trauma is fear and terror. If the wound is deep enough, and the terror big enough, your bodily systems shift to an alarm state. You never feel safe. You’re always on full-alert, just waiting for the hurt to begin again. In that state of readiness, you’re unaware that part of you has died. You are grieving. Like everyone who has loss, you have shock and disbelief, fear, loneliness and sadness. Yet you are unaware of these feelings because your guard is up. In your readiness, you abandon yourself. Yes, another abandonment.
Patrick J. Carnes (The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships)
Everything I do is dictated by my relationship with other people, and I mostly like that about myself. I’m a good daughter, friend, neighbour, teacher, even colleague – I mean, I always take time to re-fill the water cooler when its nearing empty. But there’s one relationship I’ve neglected my whole life: my relationship with myself
Claire Christian (It's Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake)
If a mother has an unhealthy need to dominate her children-which she demonstrates by bullying, terrifying, neglecting, suffocating, indulging, humiliating, overprotecting or abusing them- those children must come to the recognition that such treatment is wrong in order to begin the long process of recovery and ultimate understanding.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
What happened to you as an infant and young child powerfully shapes how you see yourself and other people, what expectations you have for relationships, how you feel about yourself, and what defensive (and healthy!) habits you’ve learned.
Jasmin Lee Cori (The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second): How to Recognize ... Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect)
This is why some relationships look so beautiful and some look so tragic — beauty belongs to the thoughtful; tragedy to the neglectful.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
Emotional neglect in childhood leads to a painful emotional loneliness that can have a long-term negative impact on a person’s choices regarding relationships and intimate partners.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.
Takeo Doi (The Anatomy of Dependence: The key analysis of Japanese behavior)
We Are Lovable Even if the most important person in your world rejects you, you are still real, and you are still okay. —Codependent No More Do you ever find yourself thinking: How could anyone possibly love me? For many of us, this is a deeply ingrained belief that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking we are unlovable can sabotage our relationships with co-workers, friends, family members, and other loved ones. This belief can cause us to choose, or stay in, relationships that are less than we deserve because we don’t believe we deserve better. We may become desperate and cling as if a particular person was our last chance at love. We may become defensive and push people away. We may withdraw or constantly overreact. While growing up, many of us did not receive the unconditional love we deserved. Many of us were abandoned or neglected by important people in our life. We may have concluded that the reason we weren’t loved was because we were unlovable. Blaming ourselves is an understandable reaction, but an inappropriate one. If others couldn’t love us, or love us in ways that worked, that’s not our fault. In recovery, we’re learning to separate ourselves from the behavior of others. And we’re learning to take responsibility for our healing, regardless of the people around us. Just as we may have believed that we’re unlovable, we can become skilled at practicing the belief that we are lovable. This new belief will improve the quality of our relationships. It will improve our most important relationship: our relationship with our self. We will be able to let others love us and become open to the love and friendship we deserve. Today, help me be aware of and release any self-defeating beliefs I have about being unlovable. Help me begin, today, to tell myself that I am lovable. Help me practice this belief until it gets into my core and manifests itself in my relationships.
Melody Beattie
Resolutely cheerful, unrepentantly sentimental, unfortunately prone to Peter Pan syndrome, in a bafflingly nonspecific relationship with a tall, beautiful woman, deeply enthusiastic about terrible hobbies, a tendency toward overdressing, neglectful or at the least careless of his health—Gomez Addams could have walked out of a pamphlet on trans-specific medical care from Vancouver Coastal Health.
Daniel Mallory Ortberg (Something That May Shock and Discredit You)
When I thought about how much time I had already put into a relationship without reciprocation from the other person and how I spent YEARS recovering and trying to recover from the damage of her verbal, emotional and physical abuse and neglect, I realized that I was the only one trying and I wasn’t the problem! That understanding changed everything!
Darlene Ouimet
As I discussed in the previous chapter, attachment researchers have shown that our earliest caregivers don't only feed us, dress us, and comfort us when we are upset; they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met. This information is embodied in the warp and woof of our brain circuitry and forms the template of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. These inner maps are remarkably stable across time. This doesn‘t mean, however, that our maps can‘t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
Neglect transpires when the accountable adult fails to provide sufficiently for the needs of a child. It may be deliberate and conscious cruelty, or it may be an incapability or unwillingness to care for and nurture a child.
Dr. Patricia Dsouza Lobo (When Roses are Crushed)
Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own. Here she will be able to refind her strength, the strength she needs to look and work at the second half of the problem - the neglected pure relationship. Only a refound person can refind a personal relationship.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Beauty always represents an inward and inexhaustible equilibrium of forces; and this overwhelms our soul, since it can neither be calculated nor mechanically produced. A sense of beauty can therefore permit us the direct experience of relationships before we can perceive them, in a differentiated manner, with our discursive reason; in this, incidentally, there is a defence for our own physical and psychic well-being, something that we cannot neglect with impunity.
Titus Burckhardt (Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on the Traditional Science and Sacred Art)
When two people in a marriage are more concerned about getting the golden eggs, the benefits, than they are in preserving the relationship that makes them possible, they often become insensitive and inconsiderate, neglecting the little kindnesses and courtesies so important to a deep relationship. They begin to use control levers to manipulate each other, to focus on their own needs, to justify their own position and look for evidence to show the wrongness of the other person. The love, the richness, the softness and spontaneity begin to deteriorate.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
There is one thing that is common to every individual, relationship, team, family, organization, nation, economy, and civilization throughout the world—one thing which, if removed, will destroy the most powerful government, the most successful business, the most thriving economy, the most influential leadership, the greatest friendship, the strongest character, the deepest love. On the other hand, if developed and leveraged, that one thing has the potential to create unparalleled success and prosperity in every dimension of life. Yet, it is the least understood, most neglected, and most underestimated possibility of our time. That one thing is trust.
Stephen M.R. Covey (The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything)
Childhood attachments shape the therapeutic relationship in the same way that they form other relationships outside therapy. Those who expect to be loved often make sure others love them, while those who expect to be neglected might evoke neglect.
Galit Atlas (Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma)
as anxiety with no particular content, as physical tension or illness, as shyness, as phobias, as a feeling of being easily overwhelmed from being with other people, as avoidance of social and intimate relationships, or just as a feeling of stress.
Kathrin A. Stauffer (Emotional Neglect and the Adult in Therapy: Lifelong Consequences to a Lack of Early Attunement)
I apparently held a belief that if I expressed my anger, I would destroy our bond forever. The relationship was not ruined; in fact, it was strengthened. But I had no reference, no previous experience to tell me this could be so. I had never dared express my anger at my family and had a marked lack of experience in this process of rupture and repair.
Jasmin Lee Cori (The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second): How to Recognize ... Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect)
Parental neglect even in intact families, can have a shattering effect on how daughters- even those with loving mothers- feel about men.
Victoria Secunda (Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life)
I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will. Prizes aren't love, but this is love.
Andrew Sean Greer (Less (Arthur Less, #1))
Cease seeking a strangers heart to love when your own remains neglected.
Sara Secora
Do Christians in fact eagerly long for Christ’s return? The more Christians are caught up in enjoying the good things of this life, and the more they neglect genuine Christian fellowship and their personal relationship with Christ, the less they will long for his return.
Wayne Grudem (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine)
I've written you sixty-seven love poems. Here’s another one for you. But really, for me. These poems are the candles that I light with the fire you have ignited in me. I place this candle here and another there so even if the stars have argued with the moon and are sulking away in a corner, you can still find your way to me. Sixty-eight poems now. What does the future hold for us? Joy? Disappointment? Gentle caresses? And subtle neglect? I hope the good is more than the bad. Much more. For what is the point of love if by lighting these candles our own flame loses its brightness? I know the good is more than the bad. Much more. I cannot wait to write you sixty-nine.
Kamand Kojouri
I was so moved that she remembered my birthday that I cried harder than I had in years. When I returned her call, she told me her computer was broken and she couldn't afford to replace it. My heart fell. As I had done so many times before, I went to her rescue. Still on the phone, I went online and bought her a new laptop, top-of-the-line. That was what she had really called for, She thanked me and hung up. I went to Casey, sobbing. Soon afterward, I closed the bank account and asked my mom to not ask me for any more gifts or money. Now my relationship with my mom is very limited, and it's still very painful for me. She continues to occasionally send me bills she can't pay. I respond by telling her that I love her but I cannot pay her bills.
Olga Trujillo (The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder)
Before I die, I want to be completely myself. Soon the idea spawned over a thousand such walls all over the world: Before I die, I would like to have a relationship with my sister. Be a great dad. Go skydiving. Make a difference in someone’s life. I don’t know if people followed through, but based on what I’ve seen in my office, a good number may have had momentary awakenings, done a little soul-searching, added more to their lists—and then neglected to tick things off. People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical.
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
These micro-moments of intimacy or neglect create a culture in which the relationship either thrives or withers. The tiny behaviours feed back on themselves and compound with time, as every interaction builds on the previous interaction, no matter how seemingly trivial. Each person's moments of pettiness and anger, or generosity and lovingness, create a feedback loop that makes the overall relationship either more toxic or happier.
Susan David (Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life)
Technological society has forgotten what scholars call the 'dying role' and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms. This role is, observers argue, among life's most important, for both the dying and those left behind. And if it is, the way we deny people this role, out of obtuseness and neglect, is cause for everlasting shame. Over and over, we in medicine inflict deep gouges at the end of people's lives and then stand oblivious to the harm done.
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
You were like no man I had ever heard of. You could have made whatever you liked of me. But you did nothing. A woman isn't like money that put in a bank and it will bring you interest without you doing anything about it. A woman is a person.
John Berger (G.)
Your vulnerable partner may frequently put himself down and sometimes respond to positive feedback, but, in general, he is chronically self-critical and may seem neglectful or dejected most of the time. It often looks like depression. If this is your partner, you may become aware of this pattern over time through the absolute sense of isolation, neglect, and disconnection that unfolds.
Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.
Lloyd DeMause (The Emotional Life of Nations)
Everything in the kingdom depends upon whether or not we hear the word of God. I will endure months of silence if He will but speak one creative word from His mouth to my spirit. Our devotional life with God is more like the planting of a garden. When we arise from sowing into the secret place, we will not usually be able to point to immediate results or benefits. What we sow today will require an entire season of growth before the results are manifest. The wisest thing you’ll ever do in this life is to draw close to God and to seek Him with all your heart. I never consider time invested in the secret place to be wasteful; and even if it is, I gladly waste it upon my Lord! When you neglect the secret place, He’s not disappointed in you, He’s disappointed for you. One day of exhilaration in the Holy Spirit is worth a thousand days of struggle! The greatest things in life—those things that carry eternal value—always come at the steepest price. The closer you get to God, the more you realize He’s in no hurry. No one can mentor you into an abiding relationship with Christ. We all have to find our own way to abiding in Christ. When all is said and done, we must shut the door, get into the secret place with God, and discover what an abiding relationship with Christ will look like for ourselves.
Bob Sorge (Secrets of the Secret Place: Keys to Igniting Your Personal Time With God)
Most kids who don't feel enough love and nurturance carry around this kind of inner rage- a rage that often lasts throughout adulthood. The people who should have cared for them didn't. The lesson to take away: All people are shit. This is why troubled youth walk around with chips on their shoulders and why they are so hard to help. Early on they learn that people can't be trusted. They often spend the rest of their lives embracing this damaging belief. Seeing the world through shit-coloured glasses, they are hypersensitive to every possible slight or judgement, and they believe anyone friendly or kind must have an ulterior motive. Despite all this, wounded people desperately want and need love. But, terrified to trust, they constantly do thing to test and sabotage their relationships. This push-pull dance is well-known to anyone who's ever been close to a victim of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Those who suffer from BPD are hypersensitive to perceived slights from others and can grow notoriously hostile when they feel dissed.... For survivors of abuse, who you trust is a matter of survival. Its black and white. There can be no apologies. There can be no gray. There are no exceptions.-Scared Selfless
Michelle Stevens
My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old age. Are not the here, the now, the individual and her relationships the casualties of modern life? The present is passed over in the race for the future, the here is neglected in favor of the there, and the individual is dwarfed by the enormity of the mass. America, which as the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future. It may be our special function to emphasize again these neglected realities, not as a retreat from greater responsibilities, but as a first real step toward a deeper understanding and solution of them. When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)
Advances in biological knowledge have highlighted the potential chronicity of effects of childhood maltreatment, demonstrating particular life challenges in managing emotions, forming and maintaining healthy relationships, healthy coping, and holding a positive outlook of oneself.
Christine Wekerle (Childhood Maltreatment)
Making a career out of a hobby was great, but it had a few downsides. Passion often turned into an obsession to the exclusion of everything else. The intense focus was good for attaining incredible skill, but not for relationships, health, and fitness, which usually got neglected.
I.T. Lucas (Dark Operative a Glimmer of Hope (The Children of the Gods #18))
If you suffered from neglect in childhood, it may cause you to go from one person to another, hoping that someone will supply whatever is missing. You may not be able to care much about yourself, and think marriage will end this, and then find yourself in the alarming situation of being married but emotionally unattached. . . . Moreover, the person who [has] neglect in his background is always restless and anxious because he cannot obtain emotional satisfaction. . . . These restless, impulsive moves help to create the illusion of living emotionally. . . . Such a person may, for example, be engaged to be married to one person and simultaneously be maintaining sexual relationships with two or three others. Anyone who offers admiration and respect has appeal to them—and because their need for affection is so great, their ability to discriminate is severely impaired.21
Jerold J. Kreisman (I Hate You--Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality)
It is as if, even within the privacy of our own minds, we are afraid to criticize her. We are protecting the image of mother inside, protecting our fragile relationship with her by denying anything that might unsettle it, and protecting ourselves from the disappointment, anger, and pain that we’ve kept out of consciousness.
Jasmin Lee Cori (The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second): How to Recognize ... Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect)
If you neglect your fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, and wives, then don't be surprised when the Creator is forced to neglect you. Neglect, and you will be neglected. Protect, and you will be protected. Reject, and you will be rejected. Love all, and all that love will be mirrored by the Creator and reflected back onto YOU.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care. But there are two forces that will be constantly working against this happening. First, you’ll be routinely tempted to invest your resources elsewhere—in things that will provide you with a more immediate payoff. And second, your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention. They love you and they want to support your career, too. That can add up to neglecting the people you care about most in the world. The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don’t nurture and develop those relationships, they won’t be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.
Clayton M. Christensen (How Will You Measure Your Life?)
A common and traditionally masculine marital problem is created by the husband who, once he is married, devotes all his energies to climbing mountains and none to tending to his marriage, or base camp, expecting it to be there in perfect order whenever he chooses to return to it for rest and recreation without his assuming any responsibility for its maintenance. Sooner or later this “capitalist” approach to the problem fails and he returns to find his untended base camp a shambles, his neglected wife having been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, having run off with another man, or in some other way having renounced her job as camp caretaker. An equally common and traditionally feminine marital problem is created by the wife who, once she is married, feels that the goal of her life has been achieved. To her the base camp is the peak. She cannot understand or empathize with her husband’s need for achievements and experiences beyond the marriage and reacts to them with jealousy and never-ending demands that he devote increasingly more energy to the home. Like other “communist” resolutions of the problem, this one creates a relationship that is suffocating and stultifying, from which the husband, feeling trapped and limited, may likely flee in a moment of “mid-life crisis.” The women’s liberation movement has been helpful in pointing the way to what is obviously the only ideal resolution: marriage as a truly cooperative institution, requiring great mutual contributions and care, time and energy, but existing for the primary purpose of nurturing each of the participants for individual journeys toward his or her own individual peaks of spiritual growth. Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth. As an adolescent I used to thrill to the words of love the early American poet Ann Bradstreet spoke to her husband: “If ever two were one, then we.”20 As I have grown, however, I have come to realize that it is the separateness of the partners that enriches the union. Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of “religious violence,” we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence.
Jack David Eller (Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence Across Culture and History)
As long as the abuse or neglect experienced in childhood remains buried within, we re-recreate our family in adult relationships.
Kenneth Adams (Silently Seduced, Revised & Updated)
There is no lack of harmony in the relationship of a sensual couple. Problems arise when sensuality is neglected.
Lebo Grand
But that's how it is when a flower is neglected, not cared for, or watered - it eventually withers, and so do friendships and relationships.
Eva Dabrowska
When you allow the immature to dictate the terms of relationships, you are giving them the green light to exploit, neglect, or abuse you.
Paul Coughlin (No More Christian Nice Girl: When Just Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts You, Your Family, and Your Friends)
We live in a period where people spend more time trying to influence people they don’t know, neglecting the people who are next to them craving their attention.
Sope Agbelusi
In all death penalty cases, spending time with clients is important. Developing the trust of clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation & deal with the stress of a potential execution; it's also key to effective advocacy. A client's life often depends on his lawyer's ability to create a mitigation narrative that contextualizes his poor decisions or violent behavior. Uncovering things about someone's background that no one has previously discovered--things that might be hard to discuss but are critically important--requires trust. Getting someone to acknowledge he has been the victim of child sexual abuse, neglect, or abandonment won't happen without the kind of comfort that takes hours and multiple visits to develop. Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes effective work possible.
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy)
When we are driven by ego and a relentless need to succeed, it’s easy to blindly neglect the relationships, self-care and truth that will create joy and authentic fulfillment in our lives.
Shannon Tanner (Worthy: The POWER of Wholeness)
You can be dressed to the nines and have it all going on, but if you don’t have shoes to support your look, they can be your undoing. Your shoes should be appropriate, clean, polished, and maintained if you want to make a great impression and fortify your credibility. If your shoes are scuffed, dirty, or worn, clients may wonder what other details you’ve neglected to attend to.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Preparation: 8 Ways to Plan with Purpose & Intention for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #2))
In our adult relationships, we fearfully guard against any sign of shame, abuse or neglect. We become manipulative or avoid other people and circumstances. This fear can grow stronger than the shame itself. It forms a shaky foundation for relationships. We continue to draw others near us (hoping for intimacy) but when they get too close, we push them away because of our fear of shame.
CoDA (CO-DEPENDENTS ANONYMOUS)
As for doctrine, Luther asserted the absolute authority of Holy Scripture and that each human must discover the meaning of scripture and establish his or her own, personal relationship with God.
Rodney Stark (How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity)
Take geography. Physical geography, which is a science, is considered difficult; human geography, which strives to be a science, is considered less difficult; humanistic geography, full of poetry and good feeling, is widely viewed as the softie of the three, taken up by the intellectually lazy or unprepared. Human geography studies human relationships. Under the influence of Marxism, it often shows them to be one of exploitation, using physical force when necessary and the subtler devices deception when not. Human geography's optimism lies in its belief that asymmetrical relationships and exploitation can be removed, or reversed. What human geography does not consider, and what humanistic geography does, is the role they play in nearly all human contacts and exchanges. If we examine them conscientiously, no one will feel comfortable throwing the first stone. As for deception, significantly, only Zoroastrianism among the great religions has the command, "Thou shalt not lie." After all, deception and lying are necessary to smoothing the ways of social life. From this, I conclude that humanistic geography is neglected because it is too hard. Nevertheless, it should attract the tough-minded and idealistic, for it rests ultimately on the belief that we humans can face the most unpleasant facts, and even do something about them, without despair.
Yi-Fu Tuan
Despite the fact that our failed developmental history was our parents’ “fault,” each of us has the ultimate responsibility for our own life. Those of us who have been victimized by indifference, neglect, or abuse are responsible for the rest of our lives. We must work to understand our histories, to separate as best as we can from those who have hurt us, and to pursue gratifying relationships in the future.
David P. Celani (Leaving Home: The Art of Separating from Your Difficult Family)
Core needs for children include, but are not limited to, receiving adequate levels of time, love, and attention, along with meeting their needs to feel heard, validated, and understood. When these needs aren’t met, there is no way to rewind to the beginning of life in a way that enables any outside love relationship to heal or meet your core needs. Research naively suggests we seek other relationships outside our family to supply our basic needs of love, acceptance, and emotional support. Although other love relationships are fundamental, necessary, and important to our overall well-being, I believe it is not only inappropriate for us to put this type of pressure on others to fill the needs our family neglected, but this request is also impossible to satisfy. It is unwise and emotionally dangerous to assume anyone could meet the core needs that can be met only by the family we were born into. The unfortunate message from this type of information is that other people can heal our wounds and meet our core needs when, ultimately, we need to learn to heal our own wounds and meet our own needs.
Sherrie Campbell (Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut)
the good-enough mother is frequently off the mark and that repairing ruptures in relationships again and again is part of securing the bond and creating a sense of resilience. This is true whether we’re talking about the mother-child bond, a therapist-client relationship, a relationship with a partner, or any other significant relationship. We need to know that the other can manage the upsetting feelings that come with such ruptures and won’t go away, and that together we can fix it.
Jasmin Lee Cori (The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second): How to Recognize ... Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect)
The common feelings that will begin to emerge for you are; frustration, confusion, fear of confrontation, exhaustion, uncertainty of where you stand with him or her, inadequacy, neglect, disempowerment, loneliness, alienation from family and friends.
Eleanor D. Payson (The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family)
I feel the swelling energy, the inexplicable, restless hunger, rising in my own innocent life. I don't care at all about the music or the drinking or the gathering together of teenagers for fun and the thrill of belonging. But my father is gone. He has a new life, a new wife and daughter, and never calls or visits. I miss him badly. My mother is inaccessible. My older brother and sister have moved on to their own lives, leaving me alone at home and on the beach while my mother works and plays with Peter.
Meredith Hall (Without a Map)
I think it's easy, when...when you're neglecting your own happiness, to inadvertently neglect the happiness of the people you love. It's sort of like you think you're being selfless or self-sacrificial or something, but really you're just sowing misery everywhere you go.
Antonia Angress (Sirens & Muses)
You obliterate my central sun and i hate and fear you for it . . . every moment with you is fraught with my anxiety of failure to be who you want me to be, to say what you want me to say . . . You don't remember you have a daughter. You never see my pain. You see yourself.
Carol Lee (To Die For)
One reason it is vital to respond to an infant's needs is trhat the baby feels it is the cause of its own neglect, although this is not a conscious thought. Such narcissistic feelings pave the road to an infant's psychological and physical growth; since the baby senses no boundaries between herself and her mother, she "believes" that her cries cause the mother to tend to her. And if the mother does not tend to her, the baby believes that she created her own rejection by not being lovable, not worthy of care. It's a belief that haunts one's life.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
Mothers are programmed to teach the fit. They are unequipped to listen to pleas, to alter their patterns. Mothers know how to nurse and nurture those who they have hope for—they coo over babies with infections they can help heal, they give advice for things they know, they protect from the dangers they know how to fear. But once their baby becomes so hurt the mother doesn't know how to heal her, she neglects because she doesn't know better. The tricks she knows don't work, she fears, and, eventually, when she is so lost she feels hopeless, she abandons.
Aspen Matis (Girl in the Woods: A Memoir)
Child neglect and abuse is a hidden epidemic. The topic is taboo. Surviving abusive relationships, especially in the family unit, is complicated. Oftentimes, victims of child abuse, sexual assaults, domestic violence, and narcissistic abuse don’t report it. During my extensive research, I discovered that most children don’t disclose their sexual abuse, until late in life. On the website, Child USA, they share about delayed disclosure. “Most child victims of sexual assault disclose, if they disclose at all, during adulthood, with a median age of 48 and an average age of 52.
Dana Arcuri (Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma)
Economic relationships are so different from political relationships, and so much more complex, that no government could regulate them all without such an enslaving bureaucracy. State interference always neglects some factor of the intricate industrial situation, and has failed whenever tried;
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
Most kids who don't feel enough love and nurturance carry around this kind of inner rage- a rage that often lasts throughout adulthood. The people who should have cared for them didn't. The lesson to take away: All people are shit. This is why troubled youth walk around with chips on their shoulders and why they are so hard to help. Early on they learn that people can't be trusted. They often spend the rest of their lives embracing this damaging belief. Seeing the world through shit-coloured glasses, they are hypersensitive to every possible slight or judgement, and they believe anyone friendly or kind must have an ulterior motive. Despite all this, wounded people desperately want and need love. But, terrified to trust, they constantly do things to test and sabotage their relationships. This push-pull dance is well-known to anyone who's ever been close to a victim of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Those who suffer from BPD are hypersensitive to perceived slights from others and can grow notoriously hostile when they feel dissed.... For survivors of abuse, who you trust is a matter of survival. Its black and white. There can be no apologies. There can be no gray. There are no exceptions.-Scared Selfless
Michelle Stevens
I just felt so fucked up about trans ness and class and how completely cut off from my political or activist life I've been in the suicide museum, just going to no protests and no planning meetings and systematically neglecting any relationship with anyone who would pull me back into activist work, because I have no constitution for it, no imagination for it, just imagination for myself, my clothes, my drugs, my friends, my fucked up gender, my surgeries and health insurance and did I mention clothes, my web browser is all 60 tabs of Issey Miyake and 12 tabs of Wendler's glottoplasty longitudinal research...
Hannah Baer (trans girl suicide museum)
Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah, Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decesion of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending into your bosom Stupid relationship inflted in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all into pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter into the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora Into the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum-flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize Shubha Women could be treacherous even after unfolding a helpless appeareance Today it seems there is nothing so treacherous as Women and Art Now my ferocious heart is rinning towards an impossible death Vertigoes of water are coming up to my neck from the pierced earth I will die Oh what are these happening within me? I am failing to fetch out my hand and my palm From the dried sperms on my trousers spreading wings 300000 children are gliding toward the district of Shubha's bosom Millions of needles are now running from my blood into Poetry Now the smuggling of my obstinate leg is trying to plunge Into the death killer sex-wig entangled in the hypnotic kingdom of words In violent mirrors on each wall of the room I am observing After letting loose a few naked Malay, his unestablished scramblings.
Malay Roy Choudhury (Selected Poems)
Today, our society is caught in the grip of superficial values—glamour, glitter, materialism, a pathological emphasis on youth, a neglect of the elderly, the handicapped. Families are being broken up under the impact of a frenzied desire for success. Violence is glorified and paraded in front of children every day on the media.
Patrick J. Carnes (The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships)
The same is true for social fitness. It’s not easy to take care of our relationships today, and in fact, we tend to think that once we establish friendships and intimate relationships, they will take care of themselves. But like muscles, neglected relationships atrophy. Our social life is a living system. And it needs exercise.
Robert Waldinger (The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness)
Whether children bond with their parent at birth or later, they need this relationship. Without it, children have a much harder time developing a sense of who they are. Neglect and apathy from parents can lead to an increase in mental illness for the child and a lack of motivation to reach developmental milestones and independence.
Brenda Stephens (Recovering from Narcissistic Mothers: A Daughter's Guide)
Since there are always two parties in a relationship, the need for space may vary, as each would come with their own set of beliefs about how to spend time together and how much togetherness is too much and how much exclusive time one can claim from their partner. The conflicts arise when one partner feels neglected or left out due to the other’s need for space. If a partner expresses their need for space, it might feel like rejection or abandonment to the other. The clingy partner becomes clingier and the partner who is trying to get some space resents it, tries harder to break away, or if that isn’t possible, lies about that late office meeting when they have actually been at the pub, having a drink with their friends.
Preeti Shenoy (Why We Love the Way We Do)
Bottoming out can vary from person to person; however, the general consensus reveals that the person usually has exhausted all resources, lacks self-love, and is practicing self-harm. The person may be allowing others to neglect and abuse him. While a bottom is in progress, denial is rampant and relatives or friends may have turned away. At this juncture, the adult child usually isolates or becomes involved in busy work to avoid asking for help. He scrambles to manipulate anyone who might still be having contact with him. Some adult children are at the other extreme. They have resources and speak of a bright future or new challenge; however, their bottom involves an inability to connect with others on a meaningful level. Their lives are unmanageable due to perfectionism and denial that seals them off from others. These are the high-functioning adults who seem to operate in the stratosphere of success. In their self-sufficiency they avoid asking for help, but they feel a desperate disconnect from life. Their bottom can be panic attacks without warning or bouts of depression that are pushed away with work or a new relationship.
Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organization (Adult Children of Alcoholics/Dysfunctional Families)
THE METAPHYSICAL POETS Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime (Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress) While theatre was the most public literary form of the period, poetry tended to be more personal, more private. Indeed, it was often published for only a limited circle of readers. This was true of Shakespeare's sonnets, as we have seen, and even more so for the Metaphysical poets, whose works were published mostly after their deaths. John Donne and George Herbert are the most significant of these poets. The term 'Metaphysical' was used to describe their work by the eighteenth-century critic, Samuel Johnson. He intended the adjective to be pejorative. He attacked the poets' lack of feeling, their learning, and the surprising range of images and comparisons they used. Donne and Herbert were certainly very innovative poets, but the term 'Metaphysical' is only a label, which is now used to describe the modern impact of their writing. After three centuries of neglect and disdain, the Metaphysical poets have come to be very highly regarded and have been influential in recent British poetry and criticism. They used contemporary scientific discoveries and theories, the topical debates on humanism, faith, and eternity, colloquial speech-based rhythms, and innovative verse forms, to examine the relationship between the individual, his God, and the universe. Their 'conceits', metaphors and images, paradoxes and intellectual complexity make the poems a constant challenge to the reader.
Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was. We do not possess anything in this world, least of all other people. We only imagine that we do. Our friends, our lovers, our spouses, even our children are not ours; they belong only to themselves. Possessive and controlling friendships and relationships can be as harmful as neglect.
Alison Willcocks
She said that since marrying Kevin, she’d neglected the parts of her that loved to play with friends because he had wanted her home with him, even though he was usually in his study writing. She said she would never do that again and was glad that Kevin could now support her independence. Helen was liberating her neo-exiles, and Kevin was making room for them in their shared life. Kevin had found courageous love.
Richard C. Schwartz (You Are the One You've Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships)
Masculinity and femininity attract one another, and their attributes are complementary; however this entails more than simply a male being attracted to a female: What actually complements the immature man who runs around, or cheats, or neglects his duties, is the masculine woman because he needs her to lead and to take charge, to take care of him. Immaturity is a state of need, and one of those needs is the need to be kept in check.
Criss Jami
That’s why we need a friend whom we’ve given permission to tell us like it is—no matter what. Even if we refuse to listen at first, we all need a friend who will tell us when we’re neglecting our family for work. A friend who will say something when our spending gets out of control. A friend who will challenge us to do more than just come to church a few weekends a month. A friend who will question a new relationship we’re beginning.
Kyle Idleman (40 Days to Lasting Change: An AHA Challenge)
I have always tried to be all the tings my mother wanted me to be; ever the lady, always polite, never inconsiderate. I run my business the way my mother ran our house - everything just so. In some ways I am my mother - full of life when I'm happy, very cold when I'm angry. People say I look just like her. I'll tell you a secret: every time I pass a mirror, I gasp. I wonder if there's more here than meets the eye." - Karen, thirty-nine.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
In the parent-child interaction is established the child’s sense of the world: whether this is a world of love and acceptance, a world of neglectful indifference in which one must root and scratch to have one’s needs satisfied or, worse, a world of hostility where one must forever maintain an anxious hypervigilance. Future relationships will have as their templates nerve circuits laid down in our relationships with our earliest caregivers.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No)
It is the Holy Spirit who keeps us from this path and gives us confidence so we can enjoy intimacy with our Creator. Though I do not believe God gives us His Spirit solely for our personal benefit, it is undeniable that one of the greatest aspects of being in relationship with the Holy Spirit is the intimacy, security, and encouragement He brings us. It is then we can serve God as a beloved child rather than a stressed-out, guilt-ridden slave.
Francis Chan (Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit)
It doesn't matter if you are a pastor, professor, lawyer, president, prophet, etc, if you are married your first responsibility (calling) is to your family - wife to the husband and husband to wife. Until you come to that realization and submit accordingly, society won't have a healthy family life and your overall calling will suffer. The world has overrated public display of success neglecting private victories from the home and smaller units of our community.
Bernard Kelvin Clive
We have no obligation to endure or enable certain types of certain toxic relationships. The Christian ethic muddies these waters because we attach the concept of long-suffering to these damaging connections. We prioritize proximity over health, neglecting good boundaries and adopting a Savior role for which we are ill-equipped. Who else we'll deal with her?, we say. Meanwhile, neither of you moves towards spiritual growth. She continues toxic patterns and you spiral in frustration, resentment and fatigue. Come near, dear one, and listen. You are not responsible for the spiritual health of everyone around you. Nor must you weather the recalcitrant behavior of others. It is neither kind nor gracious to enable. We do no favors for an unhealthy friend by silently enduring forever. Watching someone create chaos without accountability is not noble. You won't answer for the destructive habits of an unsafe person. You have a limited amount of time and energy and must steward it well. There is a time to stay the course and a time to walk away. There's a tipping point when the effort becomes useless, exhausting beyond measure. You can't pour antidote into poison forever and expect it to transform into something safe, something healthy. In some cases, poison is poison and the only sane response is to quit drinking it. This requires honest self evaluation, wise counselors, the close leadership of the Holy Spirit, and a sober assessment of reality. Ask, is the juice worth the squeeze here. And, sometimes, it is. You might discover signs of possibility through the efforts, or there may be necessary work left and it's too soon to assess. But when an endless amount of blood, sweat and tears leaves a relationship unhealthy, when there is virtually no redemption, when red flags are frantically waved for too long, sometimes the healthiest response is to walk away. When we are locked in a toxic relationship, spiritual pollution can murder everything tender and Christ-like in us. And a watching world doesn't always witness those private kill shots. Unhealthy relationships can destroy our hope, optimism, gentleness. We can lose our heart and lose our way while pouring endless energy into an abyss that has no bottom. There is a time to put redemption in the hands of God and walk away before destroying your spirit with futile diligence.
Jen Hatmaker (For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards)
In his great work Attachment and Loss (published in three volumes in 1969, 1972 and 1980), Bowlby explained that an adult’s sense of self is built up through the relationships it has as a child: if a parent or carer is warm, consistent, attuned, steady and kind, the child will thrive. It will have confidence in itself and in the world. It will know how to love and will have the courage to start relationships, secure in the knowledge that it can complain calmly if its needs are neglected.
The School of Life (How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times)
In accepting as two primary texts, Singer's Animal Liberation and Regan's The Case for Animal Rights--texts that valorize rationality--the animal defense movement reiterates a patriarchal disavowal of emotions as having a legitimate role in theory making. The problem is that while on the one hand it articulates positions against animal suffering, on the other hand animal rights theory dispenses with the idea that caring about and emotionally responding to this suffering can be appropriate sources of knowledge. Emotions and theory are related. One does not have to eviscerate theory of emotional content and reflection to present legitimate theory. Nor does the presence of emotional content and reflection eradicate or militate against thinking theoretically. By disavowing emotional responses, two major texts of animal defense close off the intellectual space for recognizing the role of emotions in knowledge and therefore theory making. As the issue of caring about suffering is problematized, difficulties with animal rights per se become apparent. Without a gender analysis, several important issues that accompany a focus on suffering are neglected, to the detriment of the movement. Animal rights theory offers a legitimating language for animal defense without acknowledging the indebtedness of the rights-holder to caring relationships. Nor does it provide models for theoretically engaging with our own emotional responses, since emotions are seen as untrustworthy. Because the animal advocacy movement has failed to incorporate an understanding of caring as a motivation for so many animal defense activists, and because it has not addressed the gendered nature of caring--that it is woman's duty to provide service to others, while it is men's choice--it has not addressed adequately the implications that a disproportionate number of activists are women motivated because they care about animal suffering. Animal rights theory that disowns or ignores emotions mirrors on the theoretical level the gendered emotional responses inherent in a patriarchal society. In this culture, women are supposed to do the emotional work for heterosexual intimate relationships: 'a man will come to expect that a woman's role in his life is to take care of his feelings and alleviate the discomfort involved in feeling.' At the cultural level, this may mean that women are doing the emotional work for the animal defense movement. And this emotional work takes place in the context of our own oppression.
Carol J. Adams
The left hemisphere prefers the impersonal to the personal, and that tendency would be in any case be instantiated in the fabric of a technologically driven and bureaucratically administered society. The impersonal would come to replace the personal. There would be a focus on material things at the expense of the living. Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place, the context in which each person belongs, would be neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members. Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world. Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others. As a result individualities would be ironed out and identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on, which would also feel themselves to be implicitly or explicitly in competition with, resentful of, one another. Paranoia and lack of trust would come to be the pervading stance within society both between individuals, and between such groups, and would be the stance of government towards its people.
Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World)
Your mother did things her way when you were a child and it caused you to lose faith in yourself, become depressed or emotionally repressed, or become involved in an unhealthy relationship. If you have come to realize this and come to accept it, you might feel as if everything you do is her fault. In reality, you can no longer rightfully put the blame for your current actions on your mother. You have the power to take charge today. Claim that power and live the way you want to live. Only then will you be truly healed.
J.L. Anderson (The Emotionally Absent Mother, How to Overcome Your Childhood Neglect When You Don’t Know Where To Start.)
She had the changing quality of dream. She obeyed her own oscillations. What came into being between them was not a marriage but an interplay where nothing was ever fixed. No planetary tensions, chartered and mapped and measured. Her movements were of absolute abandon, yieldingness and then at the smallest sign of lethargy or neglect, complete withdrawal and he had to begin his courtship anew. every day she could be won again lost again. and the reason for her flights and departures, her breaks from him, were obscure and mysterious to him.
Anaïs Nin (Ladders to Fire (Cities of the Interior #1))
Helicopter parenting is a big problem today. We never want our children to fail, and we’ll do almost anything to prevent it from happening. In doing so, we are allowing them to take that elevator to top, only to have them find out later that, in the real world, there is no elevator to success. We don’t allow our children to take the stairs, neglecting the fact that we won’t be around forever to pick them up when they fall, or to keep them from falling altogether. When they have to climb the stairs themselves, their legs don’t have the strength.
Kevin Harrington (Mentor to Millions: Secrets of Success in Business, Relationships, and Beyond)
In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, senior demon Screwtape coaches a junior devil on how to infect a man’s relationship with others: “Keep his mind off the most elementary of duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful of human characteristics, the horror and neglect of the obvious.”2 He continues, “I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s ‘soul’ to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.
Tish Harrison Warren (Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life)
To regain a sense of mastery when there is ambiguity about a loved one's absence or presence, we must give up trying to find the perfect solution. We must redefine our relationship to the missing person. Most important, we must realize that the confusion we are experiencing is attributable to the ambiguity rather than something we did - or neglected to do. Once we know the source of our helplessness, we are free to begin the coping process. We assess the situation, begin revising our perceptions ... We feel more in charge even though the ambiguity persists.
Pauline Boss
My needs were covered by layer upon layer of denial. I was scrambling for reasons. But the truth was, even if he had had a successful career, I would have used it as an excuse to complain about neglect. He could never actually win. I was running a very common script, that of deciphering why he wasn’t enough for me and why I needed someone else—as if someone else could give me everything. As if there was one person who could be my Mr. Right and who could satisfy every ever-changing facet of my personality. At that point I still believed that this was possible…desirable…and necessary.
Louisa Leontiades (The Husband Swap)
When two people in a marriage are more concerned about getting the golden eggs, the benefits, than they are in preserving the relationship that makes them possible, they often become insensitive and inconsiderate, neglecting the little kindnesses and courtesies so important to a deep relationship. They begin to use control levers to manipulate each other, to focus on their own needs, to justify their own position and look for evidence to show the wrongness of the other person. The love, the richness, the softness and spontaneity begin to deteriorate. The goose gets sicker day by day.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
She had never brought courage to either life or love. Her eyes ransacked her heart. She thought of the amulets and of her beads, her drunkenness... she thought of her daughter. She remembered the long relationship, crowded with the wreckage of exhumed conversations, of fancied slights, of inopportune confidences, of charges of neglect and exclusion (but she must have been mad that day; she remembered beating on the table). "But it's not my fault," she cried. "It's not my fault that I was so. It was circumstance. It was the way I was brought up. Tomorrow I begin a new life. Wait and see, oh my child.
Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)
After a few years of this, when I was around fourteen, she eventually stopped trying to parent me, and instead it felt like I had become her enemy. But I was self-sufficient by then and didn’t need my mother coming in twice a week and pretending she had any say over me when she knew nothing about my life, or who I was as a person. We lived together until I graduated high school, but we were not friends and there was no relationship between us whatsoever. When she spoke to me, her words were insults. Because of that, I eventually just stopped speaking to her. I preferred the neglect over the verbal abuse.
Colleen Hoover (Reminders of Him)
Internalizers are sensitive to the quality and genuineness of emotional intimacy in their relationships because they are attuned to feelings. They strongly desire emotional intimacy. Internalizers need to share their inner experience; their desire for a real emotional connection is a great part of their existence. For internalizers, nothing hurts more than being around people who cannot engage them emotionally, it is not a social urge for them but rather a strong hunger to connect on a more intimate level with like-minded people who can understand them and when they are unable to make this kind of connection, they feel lonely emotionally.
Theresa J. Covert (Emotionally Immature Parents: Overcoming Childhood Emotional Neglect due to Absent and Self involved Parents)
Pop culture and love songs, in particular, can contribute to our belief that love is all about chemistry and insanity. It is when you are enduring careless, neglectful, unkind, and disconnected words and behavior from a partner, and falling back on “chemistry” as the rationale, that you need to take a long hard look at the idea of chemistry as a factor that may be imprisoning you in a one-sided, narcissistic relationship. Sometimes the good guys and gals get their opportunity once a person has already been through the wringer with a narcissist. After a person experiences the scorpion’s sting, the comfort of a kind person can become a soft and loving place to land.
Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
Let’s now look at the four basic types of EI parents (Gibson 2015): Emotional parents are dominated by feelings and can become extremely reactive and overwhelmed by anything that surprises or upsets them. Their moods are highly unstable, and they can be frighteningly volatile. Small things can be like the end of the world, and they tend to see others as either saviors or abandoners, depending on whether their wishes are being met. Driven parents are super goal-achieving and constantly busy. They are constantly moving forward, focused on improvements, and trying to perfect everything, including other people. They run their families like deadline projects but have little sensitivity to their children’s emotional needs. Passive parents are the nicer parents, letting their mate be the bad guy. They appear to enjoy their children but lack deeper empathy and won’t step in to protect them. While they seem more loving, they will acquiesce to the more dominant parent, even to the point of overlooking abuse and neglect. Rejecting parents aren’t interested in relationships. They avoid interaction and expect the family to center around their needs, not their kids. They don’t tolerate other people’s needs and want to be left alone to do their own thing. There is little engagement, and they can become furious and even abusive if things don’t go their way.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy)
Technological society has forgotten what scholars call the “dying role” and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms. This role is, observers argue, among life’s most important, for both the dying and those left behind. And if it is, the way we deny people this role, out of obtuseness and neglect, is cause for everlasting shame. Over and over, we in medicine inflict deep gouges at the end of people’s lives and then stand oblivious to the harm done. Peg
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
When you are raised to put others first, you may lose touch with even your most basic physical needs, such as rest, sleep, or recreation. Early training in self-neglect means that it may now take a conscious, deliberate effort to take care of yourself. EI parents can disrupt your awareness of healthy social needs as well because they often emotionally isolate their children for their own purposes. When you pay attention to your inner self’s promptings, you might discover that you need more social contact, group activities, or community involvement than you thought. Fortunately, as you build a better relationship with yourself, you will feel increasingly confident and comfortable about seeking social situations you enjoy.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy)
Don’t feel bad for me; this isn’t a misery memoir. Just a simple statement of fact. It’s a familiar enough tale, I suspect. Like all too many children, I endured an upbringing characterized by long periods of abandonment and neglect, both physical and emotional. I was rarely touched, or played with, barely held by my mother—and the only time my father laid a hand on me was in anger. This I find harder to forgive. Not the physical violence, you understand, which I soon learned to accept as a part of life, but the lack of touch—and its repercussions for me, later, as an adult. How can I put it? It left me unused to—even afraid of?—the touch of another. And it has made intimate relationships, emotional or physical, extremely difficult.
Alex Michaelides (The Fury)
When a child is programmed to deny the Self and only obey orders, that person, as an adult, likely hasn’t developed the skill of knowing what he or she likes or doesn’t like, so, therefore, he or she does not have the ability to make a wise decision when choosing a partner. It’s easier to take orders and be compliant than to make a decision based on Self. Being told what to do, including who to be with, feels comfortable and familiar to adults who were overly controlled as children because that is how they have been programmed. As stated earlier, I believe neglect to be the foundation stone of outright abuse, although many neglected adults have developed ways of denying, justifying, and minimizing the abusive behavior they experience in relationships.
Enod Gray (Neglect-The Silent Abuser: How to Recognize and Heal from Childhood Neglect)
The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of "individual choices." The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available "common" spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities. By way of illustration, let's take a familiar scenario: Walmart or some other megastore decides to open one of its facilities in a municipality. Developers are happy, politicians welcome the new investment, and consumers are pleased at finding a wide variety of goods at lower prices. But what are the social impacts? Locally owned and operated small businesses cannot compete with the marketing behemoth and must close. People lose their jobs or must find new work for lower pay. Neighborhoods are stripped of the familiar hardware store, pharmacy, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all — why bother, when you can order online? No wonder international surveys show a rise in loneliness. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as lonely has doubled from 20 to 40 percent since the 1980s, the New York Times reported in 2016. Alarmed by the health ravages, Britain has even found it necessary to appoint a minister of loneliness. Describing the systemic founts of loneliness, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: "Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase." It is easy to miss the point that what Dr. Murthy calls "our twenty-first-century world" is no abstract entity, but the concrete manifestation of a particular socioeconomic system, a distinct worldview, and a way of life.
Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
we live in a world where logic is massively overrated, emotions are seen as a weakness and decisions based on intuition have little or no place. We have forgotten where we came from. Over time, we have neglected the limbic brain that got us to the pivotal moment in our evolution, and instead placed the cortex on a pedestal. We have demoted depth, passion and instinct and come to rely on the surface-level capabilities—such as exams, rote-learning or transactional relationships—that are more connected with material gain than true joy. We live a life dominated by stress and are too busy to really take notice of who we are, where we are going and what we want from life. We are now at a moment where technology will disrupt our minds and bodies more than we can begin to imagine.
Tara Swart (The Source: A Transformative Guide to Unlocking Your Mind, Harnessing Neuroplasticity, and Manifesting Success Through the Power of the Law of Attraction)
The relationship lurched up and down for five years. Redse hated living in his sparsely furnished Woodside house. Jobs had hired a hip young couple, who had once worked at Chez Panisse, as housekeepers and vegetarian cooks, and they made her feel like an interloper. She would occasionally move out to an apartment of her own in Palo Alto, especially after one of her torrential arguments with Jobs. “Neglect is a form of abuse,” she once scrawled on the wall of the hallway to their bedroom. She was entranced by him, but she was also baffled by how uncaring he could be. She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish on anyone, she said.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
The Ultimate Deceit A military officer was reprimanded for faking his own death to end an affair.  Worthy of a plot in a daytime soap-opera, a Navy Commander began seeing a woman that he had met on a dating website.  The Commander neglected to tell the woman that he was married with kids.  After 6 months, the Commander grew tired of the relationship and attempted to end it by sending a fictitious e-mail to his lover – informing her that he had been killed.  The Commander then relocated to Connecticut to start a new assignment.  Upon receipt of the letter, his mistress showed up at the Commander’s house to pay her respects, only to be informed, by the new owners, of the Commander’s reassignment and new location.   The Commander received a punitive letter of reprimand, and lost his submarine command.
U.S. Department of the Army (Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure – United States Government - updated July 2013)
Self-Love Self-love is the quality that determines how much we can be friends with ourselves and, day to day, remain on our own side. When we meet a stranger who has things we don’t, how quickly do we feel ourselves pitiful, and how long can we remain assured by the decency of what we have and are? When another person frustrates or humiliates us, can we let the insult go, able to perceive the senseless malice beneath the attack, or are we left brooding and devastated, implicitly identifying with the verdict of our enemies? How much can the disapproval or neglect of public opinion be offset by the memory of the steady attention of significant people in the past? In relationships, do we have enough self-love to leave an abusive union? Or are we so down on ourselves that we carry an implicit belief that harm is all we deserve? In a different vein, how good are we at apologizing to a lover for things that may be our fault? How rigidly self-righteous do we need to be? Can we dare to admit mistakes or does an admission of guilt or error bring us too close to our background sense of nullity? In the bedroom, how clean and natural or alternatively disgusting and unacceptable do our desires feel? Might they be a little odd, but not for that matter bad or dark, since they emanate from within us and we are not wretches? At work, do we have a reasonable, well-grounded sense of our worth and so feel able to ask for (and properly expect to get) the rewards we are due? Can we resist the need to please others indiscriminately? Are we sufficiently aware of our genuine contribution to be able to say no when we need to?
The School of Life (The School of Life: An Emotional Education)
A father must be good to his wife and daughter, because from watching this treatment — the son will learn how to treat all women, and his daughter will know what a good man is supposed to act like. And a mother must always remain morally good and faithful to her husband, be attentive to all her children, and be filled with patience, forgiveness, kind words, compassion and love — so her children are raised to respect all mothers, and know what a good woman is supposed to act like. If you neglect your fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, and wives, then don't be surprised when the Creator is forced to neglect you. Neglect, and you will be neglected. Protect, and you will be protected. Reject, and you will be rejected. Love all, and all that love will be mirrored by the Creator — and reflected back onto YOU.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
It would be easy, but misleading, to see the rise of terrorism expertise as simply a response to an increase in political violence. This simplistic empirical approach neglects the reflexive relationship between experts and their objects of knowledge. Others have suggested that we view terrorism expertise as a product of political propaganda by governments seeking to demonize their enemies and draw attention away from their own use of violence. But this “critical” approach (see, for example, Chomsky 2001; Herman and O’Sullivan 1989), which argues that terrorism experts constitute an “industry,” funded and organized by the state and other elite interests, neglects the agency and interests of the experts themselves, and the ways in which these interests may either harmonize or clash with those of the state, the media, and the “terrorists” themselves.
Lisa Stampnitzky (Disciplining Terror)
Hence the need for living daily and hourly and every moment at the very place of beginnings, ever as a child depending upon Him, and ever as one of the weakest of those who love Him, abiding in Him. It is a glorious thing to know that my cleansing and illumination depend upon Him, and that the whole of my responsibility in this matter is marked by my maintaining personal relationship with Him. This, however, is inexorable. Daily personal communion there must be, and the means of such, study of His word, waiting upon Him in prayer, the cultivation of close fellowship, by telling Him everything—joys as well as sorrows—and the periods of silence in which the soul simply waits and listens in the stillness for His voice, these cannot be neglected without a film, a veil, a cloud, a darkness coming between the soul and Himself, and so hindering the possibility of advancement.
G. Campbell Morgan (The Works of G. Campbell Morgan (25-in-1). Discipleship, Hidden Years, Life Problems, Evangelism, Parables of the Kingdom, Crises of Christ and more!)
Sometimes, however, unmet attachment needs have a positive impact on future relationships, if those later friendships are experienced as second chances. Eager to love and be loved, eager to meet those basic needs for caring and affiliation, children can make up for those unmet needs by being outgoing, having strong leadership qualities, and becoming devoted friends. So insecurely attached children are not doomed to a life of desperation, withdrawal, clinging, aggression, or insecurity, but they may need some additional help negotiating the complex terrain of the social world. The deeper a child’s unmet need, the harder it may be to ever have it filled later on. Expecting rejection, neglect, or smothering, the child may respond to peers with passivity, withdrawal, or aggression. Children who are afraid to assert their own needs may follow along with whatever the friend or the group says.
Michael G. Thompson (Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children)
How do you know if you'd be better off without your family?" she asked. [...] "I don't think it's so cut and dry. Like, I still talk to my parents. They love me. They just have lives that aren't the one I want." [...] "Yeah, it's about choosing how you want the people in your life to make you feel. You can decide you only want people in your life who make you feel respected, cared for, listened to. Then you communicate that to them, and if they repeatedly make you feel disrespected, neglected, or ignored instead, you stop giving them your time or energy." "Family's hard because it's rarely all bad. There's all those pretty memories of good times too. [...]" "And it feels like if you cut those people off from your future, then you lose the folks that knew that part of your past. But it's not true. You keep those memories no matter what because they're yours. They don't belong to the people you shared them with.
Roan Parrish (The Holiday Trap)
Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora In to the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize S
Malay Roy Choudhury (Selected Poems)
As children, Other-blamers were likely exposed to developmental or attachment trauma, such as abusive, shaming, rejecting, or neglectful parenting. Parents who are substance abusers or psychologically troubled often underfocus on a child’s needs. Parents may have exhibited narcissistic or Other-blaming behaviors that the child models. Another possible cause is parents who were permissive or conflict avoiding and did not hold the child accountable. Parents who overfocus on achievement or behavioral compliance can also encourage a fear of failure that may bring on Other-blaming tendencies. These experiences can cause children to feel unloved, unprotected, and inadequate. They may struggle to experience empathy for others and may develop an unhealthy hypersensitivity and overreaction to shaming experiences. While Other-blaming as a shame-management strategy may be adaptive in childhood, it causes difficulties for adult relationships at all levels, from presidential to personal.
Bandy X. Lee (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President)
Imagine the daughter of a narcissistic father as an example. She grows up chronically violated and abused at home, perhaps bullied by her peers as well. Her burgeoning low self-esteem, disruptions in identity and problems with emotional regulation causes her to live a life filled with terror. This is a terror that is stored in the body and literally shapes her brain. It is also what makes her brain extra vulnerable and susceptible to the effects of trauma in adulthood.                              Being verbally, emotionally and sometimes even physically beaten down, the child of a narcissistic parent learns that there is no safe place for her in the world. The symptoms of trauma emerge: disassociation to survive and escape her day-to-day existence, addictions that cause her to self-sabotage, maybe even self-harm to cope with the pain of being unloved, neglected and mistreated. Her pervasive sense of worthlessness and toxic shame, as well as subconscious programming, then cause her to become more easily attached to emotional predators in adulthood. In her repeated search for a rescuer, she instead finds those who chronically diminish her just like her earliest abusers. Of course, her resilience, adept skill set in adapting to chaotic environments and ability to “bounce back” was also birthed in early childhood. This is also seen as an “asset” to toxic partners because it means she will be more likely to stay within the abuse cycle in order to attempt to make things “work.” She then suffers not just from early childhood trauma, but from multiple re-victimizations in adulthood until, with the right support, she addresses her core wounds and begins to break the cycle step by step. Before she can break the cycle, she must first give herself the space and time to recover. A break from establishing new relationships is often essential during this time; No Contact (or Low Contact from her abusers in more complicated situations such as co-parenting) is also vital to the healing journey, to prevent compounding any existing traumas.
Shahida Arabi (Healing the Adult Children of Narcissists: Essays on The Invisible War Zone and Exercises for Recovery)
Gordon MacDonald once wrote about how what he called the “sinkhole syndrome” happens in a human life. It may be triggered by a failure at work, a severed relationship, harsh criticism from a parent, or for no apparent reason at all. But it feels like the earth has given way. It turns out, MacDonald wrote, that in a sense we have two worlds to manage: an outer world of career and possessions and social networks; and an inner world that is more spiritual in nature, where values are selected and character is formed — a place where worship and confession and humility can be practiced. Because our outer worlds are visible and measurable and expandable, they are easier to deal with. They demand our attention. “The result is that our private world is often cheated, neglected because it does not shout quite so loudly. It can be effectively ignored for large periods of time before it gives way to a sinkhole-like cave-in.” He quotes the haunting words of Oscar Wilde: “I was no longer captain of my own soul.” The sinkhole, says MacDonald, is the picture of spiritual vulnerability in our day.
John Ortberg (Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You)
What I just presented to you was my timeline,” she explains. “And all of you are going to do your own timelines this week. Who here has childhood trauma?” Everyone raises his hand except for me, Adam, and Santa Claus, who probably didn’t hear the question. Lorraine stares at us incredulously. “Trauma comes from any abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Think of it this way: Every time a child has a need and it’s not adequately met, that causes what we define as trauma.” “But by that definition, is there anyone in the world who doesn’t have trauma?” I ask her. “Probably not,” she replies quickly. “We link and store any experience that brings us fear or pain because we need to retain that information to survive. All you have to do is touch a hot stove once and your behavior around hot stoves changes for the rest of your life—whether you remember getting burned or not. So think of anything in your childhood that was less than nurturing as a hot stove, and when you encounter something similar as an adult, it can trigger your learned survival response. We have a saying here: If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.
Neil Strauss (The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book about Relationships)
SELF-RELIANCE Self-reliance is not only the belief that you can handle things and become successful; it is something more than that. It is having the courage to listen to your inner promptings for a hint of the kind of success you truly desire. It means taking your cue from yourself—not listening to something or someone outside yourself to get an idea of what you should be, do, or have. When we learn to read the “signs” correctly and follow our intuition, we can begin to trust ourselves and not follow the beat of someone else’s drum. RECOGNIZING AND BREAKING THE DEPENDENCY HABIT Dependency is slavery by mutual agreement. It is degrading for both the person who is dependent and the person who is being depended upon. Both parties are equally lacking in self-reliance, for such a relationship flourishes on mutual exploitation. The most unfortunate aspect of dependency is that when you think you are dependent on another individual—you are! You neglect to develop the necessary self-reliance to meet and solve your own problems. A sure sign of dependency is when you habitually look up to others as superior. The moment you begin to compare yourself
Robert Anthony (The Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-Confidence)
spontaneity begin to deteriorate. The goose gets sicker day by day. And what about a parent’s relationship with a child? When children are little, they are very dependent, very vulnerable. It becomes so easy to neglect the PC work—the training, the communicating, the relating, the listening. It’s easy to take advantage, to manipulate, to get what you want the way you want it—right now! You’re bigger, you’re smarter, and you’re right! So why not just tell them what to do? If necessary, yell at them, intimidate them, insist on your way. Or you can indulge them. You can go for the golden egg of popularity, of pleasing them, giving them their way all the time. Then they grow up without any internal sense of standards or expectations, without a personal commitment to being disciplined or responsible. Either way—authoritarian or permissive—you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to be liked. But what happens, meantime, to the goose? What sense of responsibility, of self-discipline, of confidence in the ability to make good choices or achieve important goals is a child going to have a few years down the road? And what about your relationship? When he reaches those critical teenage
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
I intervened to provide early treatment to over 300 positive patients, half of whom were comorbid and high risk.” Of this cohort, none were hospitalized and none died. “Early treatment of COVID-19, plain and simple, saves lives. If the medical profession had been forward thinking and hands-on, and focused on this disease, with an early outpatient multi-drug approach, knowing that COVID-19 is an inflammatory clotting disease, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved in the US.” “Never in the history of medicine,” says Dr. Cole, “has early treatment, of any patient with any disease, been so overtly neglected by the medical profession on such a massive scale.” Cole adds, “To not treat, especially in the midst of a highly transmissible, deadly disease, is to do harm.” Cole says that the only truly deadly pandemic is “the pandemic of under treatment.” He says, “The sacred doctor–patient relationship needs to be wrenched away from Anthony Fauci and the government/medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex. Doctors need to return to their oaths. Patients need to demand from medicine their right to be treated. This year has revealed the countless flaws of a medical system that has lost its direction and soul.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Life does not offer gifts or rewards, but opportunities. Nobody is entitled to anything. Only behavior and labor defines us and what we have. Whenever you make a choice, you follow one path and move apart from another. If your job occupies more importance in your mind, time and actions, than your dream, then you will not accomplish your dream but maybe receive a raise in your salary instead and be happy with that loss. If you look at relationships as a toy store, if you look at your companion as easily replaceable, then you will very likely lose the one you have. If you rather enjoy life with your friends than with your companion, you will end up alone. If you insult the wise, you then end up surrounded by fools. If you neglect your wealth, you will likely end up poor. If you destroy love, you will end up feeling unloved. If you destroy the good that comes to you, you will end up experiencing evil. Life will always reflect your actions, words and thoughts. You are what you spend most of your time doing, saying and thinking. Your life is always a reflection of your priorities. If you spend your time partying, insulting and occupying your mind with nonsense from social media, music with degrading lyrics, and movies that promote antisocial values, you get zero from life.
Robin Sacredfire
Heterosexual people, conforming to conventional dictate, are pillars of the society with which they are identified. Bisexuals and homosexuals, on the other hand, make valiant efforts to free themselves from the fetters of its conditioning power, and therefore come nearer to authentic behaviour. By reason of their rebellion, they are inclined to reject secondhand living as laid down by social conventions. It is not surprising that one finds many of them in the forefront of the fight for a new society, a society when authenticity is the guiding principle. But others are so much caught up in defensive behaviour that they neglect the pursuit of individual freedom in preference for a collective regimentation, which ensures a more successful battle against the cruel and subtle persecution by ‘normal people’. Nevertheless, they are, by virtue of their still precarious position, well endowed to realize that the assignment of roles which rules every aspect of behaviour, permeates society like an infectious disease, that there is a social sickness about which leads via hypocrisy and falsity to alienation. Their own fringe position makes them particularly sensitive to the schizoid shortcomings of our society where nobody knows what the other thinks, or feels, and where relationships lose their essential qualities—solidarity and trust.
Charlotte Wolff, M.D.
Before art school, I approached art as though it illustrated social relations and history, upholding or denouncing the political status quo. During my years in art school I increasingly concentrated on visual meaning, on how artwork looked—its composition, its color, its artist’s style, as separate from what it said about society. Critics call a preoccupation with appearance that ignores social meaning formalism, which carries a negative taint these days when formalism divorces art from the power relations surrounding its creation and circulation. Coming from the Left, I began as an anti-formalist. But as a maker of art, I moved toward formalism as I sought to discover processes of how art was made, a move prompted by the neglect of the formal qualities of the work of black artists, assumed to be important only according to the degree to which it critiqued American racism. Where Romare Bearden had figured in my mind as celebrating blackness and black Harlem, I now investigated how he made his work, step by step, how he decided what to depict and how to depict it. I was now seeing my father’s prized Sharecropper, by Elizabeth Catlett, which he bought from her in her studio in Mexico, less as a salute to black workers and more as a masterly lino print. From the opposite starting point, my relationship to Warhol encapsulated my trajectory.
Nell Irvin Painter (Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over)
Presentism, neglect of the future (along with forgetfulness and contempt for the past) is the paradoxical characteristic of a society and elites who have nothing but the words progress, innovation, modernity on their lips in every domain, including the economic. As soon as one is no longer ‘in love’ as depicted in television shows, as soon as sexual desire fades, one separates from one’s current partner. Marrying for superficial reasons, one separates for superficial reasons. Moreover, this compulsive and immature sort of behaviour is found not only in relationships but also in eroticism and sex in general, always under the sign of speed, immediacy, and instant gratification. Conjugal love and even sex are no longer savoured but consumed or indeed devoured, as if by fire. Despite a form of pseudo-maturity demanded in all domains, especially sexual, and an ideology of liberation, Westerners since the 1960s (the baby boom generation to which I belong) have had difficulty proceeding to the psychological stage of adulthood, that of building for the long-term. This is true even in fields very different to those of sex and relationships, and include those of politics and economics. It is the generalised reign of immaturity and improvidence. Marriage is then conceived as a sort of game, and it ends as soon as one blows the final whistle. Unrestrained enjoyment, the slogan of May ‘68,[27] inspired by a cheap, boorish hedonism, has actually passed into our mores.
Guillaume Faye
There are three people you will be judged heavily on how you treat them in this lifetime. For the man, it is his mother for giving him life, his wife for showing him life, and his daughter for teaching her all that he learned from life. For the woman, it her father for giving her the seed of life, her husband for showing her life, and her son for teaching him all that he has learned from life. How a person treats their parents is how they show their gratefulness to the Creator for life. How a husband and wife treat each other, is how they show the Creator how well they do with this gift of life, and how they value LOVE. And what each parent must teach their kids, are the valuable lessons they gained in life. A father must be good to his wife and daughter, because from watching this treatment -- the son will learn how to treat all women, and his daughter will know what a good man is supposed to act like. And a mother must always remain morally good and faithful to her husband, be attentive to all her children, and be filled with patience, forgiveness, kind words, compassion and love -- so her children are raised to respect all mothers, and know what a good woman is supposed to act like. If you neglect your fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, and wives, then don't be surprised when the Creator is forced to neglect you. Neglect, and you will be neglected. Protect, and you will be protected. Reject, and you will be rejected. Love all, and all that love will be mirrored by the Creator and reflected back onto YOU.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends. If you neglect your health or your career, you slip into the second category—stupid—which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society. I blame society for the sad state of adult fitness in the Western world. We’re raised to believe that giving of ourselves is noble and good. If you’re religious, you might have twice as much pressure to be unselfish. All our lives we are told it’s better to give than to receive. We’re programmed for unselfish behavior by society, our parents, and even our genes to some extent. The problem is that our obsession with generosity causes people to think in the short term. We skip exercise to spend an extra hour helping at home. We buy fast food to save time to help a coworker with a problem. At every turn, we cheat our own future to appear generous today. So how can you make the right long-term choices for yourself, thus being a benefit to others in the long run, without looking like a selfish turd in your daily choices? There’s no instant cure, but a step in the right direction involves the power of permission. I’m giving you permission to take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous in the long run. What? You might be wondering how a cartoonist’s permission to be selfish can help in any way. The surprising answer is that it can, in my opinion. If you’ve read this far, we have a relationship of sorts. It’s an author-reader relationship, but that’s good enough.
Scott Adams (How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life)
My former girlfriend said: ‘You don’t deserve the house you have; it’s too good for you.’ I replied: “I found a house that matched all your criteria, to make you happy. If you lost it, and ended up sleeping in a filthy room in a shared apartment, is because you don’t deserve me, I was too good for you, you disappointed me by trying to find a guy that matches you better, and you made me very unhappy. Your priories were wrong.’ Life does not offer gifts or rewards, but opportunities. Nobody is entitled to anything. Only behavior and labor defines us and what we have. Whenever you make a choice, you follow one path and move apart from another. If your job occupies more importance in your mind, time and actions, than your dream, then you will not accomplish your dream but maybe receive a raise in your salary instead and be happy with that loss. If you look at relationships as a toy store, if you look at your companion as easily replaceable, then you will very likely lose the one you have. If you rather enjoy life with your friends than with your companion, you will end up alone. If you insult the wise, you then end up surrounded by fools. If you neglect your wealth, you will likely end up poor. If you destroy love, you will end up feeling unloved. If you destroy the good that comes to you, you will end up experiencing evil. Life will always reflect your actions, words and thoughts. You are what you spend most of your time doing, saying and thinking. Your life is always a reflection of your priorities. If you spend your time partying, insulting and occupying your mind with nonsense from social media, music with degrading lyrics, and movies that promote antisocial values, you get zero from life.
Robin Sacredfire
Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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.
Christine A. Courtois
Over time, the active verbs of the Shema-recite, walk, talk, lie down, rise, bind, fix, write, all in the service of love-become too much for us to imagine, let alone perform. Our search for superpowers has created many of the most pressing problems of our time. The defining mental activity of our time is scrolling Our capacities of attention, memory, and concentration are diminishing; to compensate, we toggle back and forth between infinite feeds of news, posts, images, episodes - taking shallow hits of trivia, humor, and outrage to make up for the depths of learning, joy, and genuine lament that now feel beyond our reach. The defining illness of our time is metabolic syndrome, the chronic combination of high weight, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar that is the hallmark of an inactive life. Our strength is atrophying and our waistline expanding, and to compensate, we turn to the superpowers of the supermarket with the aisles of salt and fat convincing our bodies’ reward systems, one bite at a time, that we have never been better in our life. The defining emotional challenge of our time is anxiety, the fear of what might be instead of the courageous pursuit of what could be. Once, we lived with allness of heart, with a boldness of quest that was too in love with the good to call off the pursuit when we encountered risk. Now we live as voyeurs, pursuing shadowy vestiges of what we desire from behind the one-way mirror of a screen, invulnerable but alone. And, of course, the soul is the plane of human ex- istence that our technological age neglects most of all. Jesus asked whether it was worth gaining the whole world at the cost of losing one's soul. But in the era of superpowers, we have not only lost a great deal of our souls-we have lost much of the world as well. We are rarely overwhelmed by wind or rain or snow. We rarely see, let alone name, the stars. We have lost the sense that we are both at home and on a pilgrimage in the vast, mysterious cosmos, anchored in a rich reality beyond ourselves. We have lost our souls without even gaining the world. So it is no wonder that the defining condition of our time is a sense of loneliness and alienation. For if human flourishing requires us to love with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, what happens When nothing in our lives develops those capacities? With what, exactly, will we love?
Andy Crouch (The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World)
Have you talked about how many children you’d like to have?” “Yes, sir,” Marlboro Man said. “And?” Father Johnson prodded. “I’d like to have six or so,” Marlboro Man answered, a virile smile spreading across his face. “And what about Ree?” Father Johnson asked. “Well, she says she’d like to have one,” Marlboro Man said, looking at me and touching my knee. “But I’m workin’ on her.” Father Johnson wrinkled his brow. “How do you and Ree resolve conflict?” “Well…,” Marlboro Man replied. “To tell you the truth, we haven’t really had much conflict to speak of. We get along pretty darn well.” Father Johnson looked over his glasses. “I’m sure you can think of something.” He wanted some dirt. Marlboro Man tapped his boot on the sterile floor of Father Johnson’s study and looked His Excellence straight in the eye. “Well, she fell off her horse once when we went riding together,” he began. “And that upset her a little bit. And a while back, I dragged her to a fire with me and it got a little dicey…” Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. It was the largest “conflict” we’d had, and it had lasted fewer than twelve hours. Father Johnson looked at me. “How did you deal with that, Ree?” I froze. “Uh…uh…” I tapped my Donald Pliner mule on the floor. “I told him how I felt. And after that it was fine.” I hated every minute of this. I didn’t want to be examined. I didn’t want my relationship with Marlboro Man to be dissected with generic, one-size-fits-all questions. I just wanted to drive around in his pickup and look at pastures and curl up on the couch with him and watch movies. That had been going just fine for us--that was the nature of our relationship. But Father Johnson’s questioning was making me feel defensive, as if we were somehow neglecting our responsibility to each other if we weren’t spending every day in deep, contemplative thought about the minutiae of a future together. Didn’t a lot of that stuff just come naturally over time? Did it really serve a purpose to figure it out now? But Father Johnson’s interrogation continued: “What do you want for your children?” “Have you talked about budgetary matters?” “What role do your parents play in your life?” “Have you discussed your political preferences? Your stances on important issues? Your faith? Your religion?” And my personal favorite: “What are you both going to do, long term, to nurture each other’s creativity?” I didn’t have an answer for him there. But deep down, I knew that, somehow, gravy would come into play.
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Do Women Lack Ambition?” Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Cornell University, observes that when the dozens of successful women she interviewed told their own stories, “they refused to claim a central, purposeful place.” Were Dr. Fels to interview you, how would you tell your story? Are you using language that suggests you’re the supporting actress in your own life? For instance, when someone offers words of appreciation about a dinner you’ve prepared, a class you’ve taught, or an event you organized and brilliantly executed, do you gracefully reply “Thank you” or do you say, “It was nothing”? As Fels tried to understand why women refuse to be the heroes of their own stories, she encountered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which confirms that society considers a woman to be feminine only within the context of a relationship and when she is giving something to someone. It’s no wonder that a “feminine” woman finds it difficult to get in the game and demand support to pursue her goals. It also explains why she feels selfish when she doesn’t subordinate her needs to others. A successful female CEO recently needed my help. It was mostly business-related but also partly for her. As she started to ask for my assistance, I sensed how difficult it was for her. Advocate on her organization’s behalf? Piece of cake. That’s one of the reasons her business has been successful. But advocate on her own behalf? I’ll confess that even among my closest friends I find it painful to say, “Look what I did,” and so I don’t do it very often. If you want to see just how masterful most women have become at deflecting, the next time you’re with a group of girlfriends, ask them about something they (not their husband or children) have done well in the past year. Chances are good that each woman will quickly and deftly redirect the conversation far, far away from herself. “A key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that feminine women will forfeit opportunities for recognition,” says Fels. “When women do speak as much as men in a work situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity is assailed.” My point here isn’t to say that relatedness and nurturing and picking up our pom-poms to cheer others on is unimportant. Those qualities are often innate to women. If we set these “feminine” qualities aside or neglect them, we will have lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves. But to truly grow up, we must learn to throw down our pom-poms, believing we can act and that what we have to offer is a valuable part of who we are. When we recognize this, we give ourselves permission to dream and to encourage the girls and women
Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
Thus polyvictimization or complex trauma are "developmentally adverse interpersonal traumas" (Ford, 2005) because they place the victim at risk not only for recurrent stress and psychophysiological arousal (e.g., PTSD, other anxiety disorders, depression) but also for interruptions and breakdowns in healthy psychobiological, psychological, and social development. Complex trauma not only involves shock, fear, terror, or powerlessness (either short or long term) but also, more fundamentally, constitutes a violation of the immature self and the challenge to the development of a positive and secure self, as major psychic energy is directed toward survival and defense rather than toward learning and personal development (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). Moreover, it may influence the brain's very development, structure, and functioning in both the short and long term (Lanius et al., 2010; Schore, 2009). Complex trauma often forces the child victim to substitute automatic survival tactics for adaptive self-regulation, starting at the most basic level of physical reactions (e.g., intense states of hyperarousal/agitation or hypoarousal/immobility) and behavioral (e.g., aggressive or passive/avoidant responses) that can become so automatic and habitual that the child's emotional and cognitive development are derailed or distorted. What is more, self-integrity is profoundly shaken, as the child victim incorporates the "lessons of abuse" into a view of him or herself as bad, inadequate, disgusting, contaminated and deserving of mistreatment and neglect. Such misattributions and related schema about self and others are some of the most common and robust cognitive and assumptive consequences of chronic childhood abuse (as well as other forms of interpersonal trauma) and are especially debilitating to healthy development and relationships (Cole & Putnam, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1992). Because the violation occurs in an interpersonal context that carries profound significance for personal development, relationships become suspect and a source of threat and fear rather than of safety and nurturance. In vulnerable children, complex trauma causes compromised attachment security, self-integrity and ultimately self-regulation. Thus it constitutes a threat not only to physical but also to psychological survival - to the development of the self and the capacity to regulate emotions (Arnold & Fisch, 2011). For example, emotional abuse by an adult caregiver that involves systematic disparagement, blame and shame of a child ("You worthless piece of s-t"; "You shouldn't have been born"; "You are the source of all of my problems"; "I should have aborted you"; "If you don't like what I tell you, you can go hang yourself") but does not involve sexual or physical violation or life threat is nevertheless psychologically damaging. Such bullying and antipathy on the part of a primary caregiver or other family members, in addition to maltreatment and role reversals that are found in many dysfunctional families, lead to severe psychobiological dysregulation and reactivity (Teicher, Samson, Polcari, & McGreenery, 2006).
Christine A. Courtois (Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach)
Many models are constructed to account for regularly observed phenomena. By design, their direct implications are consistent with reality. But others are built up from first principles, using the profession’s preferred building blocks. They may be mathematically elegant and match up well with the prevailing modeling conventions of the day. However, this does not make them necessarily more useful, especially when their conclusions have a tenuous relationship with reality. Macroeconomists have been particularly prone to this problem. In recent decades they have put considerable effort into developing macro models that require sophisticated mathematical tools, populated by fully rational, infinitely lived individuals solving complicated dynamic optimization problems under uncertainty. These are models that are “microfounded,” in the profession’s parlance: The macro-level implications are derived from the behavior of individuals, rather than simply postulated. This is a good thing, in principle. For example, aggregate saving behavior derives from the optimization problem in which a representative consumer maximizes his consumption while adhering to a lifetime (intertemporal) budget constraint.† Keynesian models, by contrast, take a shortcut, assuming a fixed relationship between saving and national income. However, these models shed limited light on the classical questions of macroeconomics: Why are there economic booms and recessions? What generates unemployment? What roles can fiscal and monetary policy play in stabilizing the economy? In trying to render their models tractable, economists neglected many important aspects of the real world. In particular, they assumed away imperfections and frictions in markets for labor, capital, and goods. The ups and downs of the economy were ascribed to exogenous and vague “shocks” to technology and consumer preferences. The unemployed weren’t looking for jobs they couldn’t find; they represented a worker’s optimal trade-off between leisure and labor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these models were poor forecasters of major macroeconomic variables such as inflation and growth.8 As long as the economy hummed along at a steady clip and unemployment was low, these shortcomings were not particularly evident. But their failures become more apparent and costly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9. These newfangled models simply could not explain the magnitude and duration of the recession that followed. They needed, at the very least, to incorporate more realism about financial-market imperfections. Traditional Keynesian models, despite their lack of microfoundations, could explain how economies can get stuck with high unemployment and seemed more relevant than ever. Yet the advocates of the new models were reluctant to give up on them—not because these models did a better job of tracking reality, but because they were what models were supposed to look like. Their modeling strategy trumped the realism of conclusions. Economists’ attachment to particular modeling conventions—rational, forward-looking individuals, well-functioning markets, and so on—often leads them to overlook obvious conflicts with the world around them.
Dani Rodrik (Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science)
Stark Electric Jesus Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide
Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury (The Hungryalists)
SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.
Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)
Wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation,’ argues the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. ‘Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.’72 When it comes to consumerism, perhaps the poverty that we aim to conceal lies in our neglected relationships with each other and with the living world.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
Unless we become conscious of our unconscious, the ignored shadow and all it contains rules our lives, stifles freedom, and emerges destructively in our relationships with others.3 It may contain unprocessed grief, self-blame, and profound shame, as it did with Tanner. It may hold trauma—an episode of abuse, the emotional scars of repeated beatings from a parent, the neglect of a mother. While the narcissist seeks control, he is secretly controlled by a shadow force he cannot conquer. His self-contempt may show up as quiet, brooding anger or visceral rage, but it will show up, hurting those he professes to care about. Of
Chuck DeGroat (When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse)
The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully neglected topic. It's the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight - the entirely blissful partnerships or the murderous catastrophes - and so it is hard to know what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty. Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don't. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives. But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we unhappy; we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.
Alain de Botton (The Course of Love)
This doesn’t mean, however, that our maps can’t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs. Our maps of the world are encoded in the emotional brain, and changing them means having to reorganize that part of the central nervous system, the subject of the treatment section of this book.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
So if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention. After years of trying and failing to make time for her illustration work, by taming her to-do list and shuffling her schedule, Abel saw that her only viable option was to claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. “If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
After spending five decades of being beaten down, mistreated, and stabbed in the back, little Dana grew up. Little Dana fearlessly faced her trauma wounds. Little Dana cracked open that terrifying door to process and to address everything. And when I write everything, I mean ‘every rotten thing said and done to harm me.’ Everything from my early childhood sexual abuse, child neglect, psychological abuse, physical abuse, unfit parenting by my narcissistic mother, to my sister’s spouse who sexually assaulted me, to every imaginable covert scheme by my six toxic siblings (AKA Flying Monkeys) who sadistically enjoyed hurting me. They each took great pleasure in trying to destroy me, my life, my health, my relationships, my career, and my reputation.
Dana Arcuri CTRC (Toxic Siblings: A Survival Guide to Rise Above Sibling Abuse & Heal Trauma)
And the simple truth is this: When we are obstacles to our partners’ pursuit of their own needs, or when we neglect to fulfill any needs that fall to us as their partners, we are complicit in their decisions to pursue those needs elsewhere.
Matthew Fray (This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships)
If you think you are holding a girl in the palm of your hand, you're already off on the wrong foot.
Wyatt B. Pringle, Jr.
To face decline—and even death—with courage and confidence. To rebuild the relationships you neglected on the long road to worldly success. And to dive into the uncertainty of a transition you have worked so hard to evade.
Arthur C. Brooks (From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life)
Peter Kaufman, CEO of Glenair and one of the smartest people you will ever come across, once wrote: We tend to take every precaution to safeguard our material possessions because we know what they cost. But at the same time we neglect things which are much more precious because they don’t come with price tags attached: The real value of things like our eyesight or relationships or freedom can be hidden to us, because money is not changing hands.
Morgan Housel (Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes)
that early childhood trauma—like abuse or neglect—could alter a child’s amygdala
Lauren Douglas (Defiant No More: The Unconventional Guide to Help Your Children Overcome Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Anger, Build Good Relationships and Grow Self Esteem (Parenting Plan))
Being online controls so much of our day that we often neglect to invest time with meaningful relationships offline.
Germany Kent
As we will talk about much more, relationships are the key to healing. But for James, every relational interaction resulted in disengagement. To him, ‘others’ were not safe. In his worldview, people hurt you or left you. Others could not be trusted. The lesson for me was that a key aspect of ‘What happened to you? Is What didn’t happen for you? What attention, nurturing touch, reassurance-basically, what love-didn’t you get? I realized the neglect is as toxic as trauma.
Bruce D. Perry (What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
Summary: Seeing the best in people can be challenging at times, especially when we are in constant proximity to them. We can perceive people in the following five ways: See only bad and magnify it. See good and bad, neglect the good and focus on the bad. See good and bad, and be neutral to both. See good and bad, choose to focus on the good and neglect the bad. See the good and magnify it. The ideal state is the fourth stage, in which one’s relationships flourish. Reaching the fourth stage takes consistent hard work and practice. TEN Correcting Cautiously Corrective feedback can make or break our relationships.
Gaur Gopal Das (Life’s Amazing Secrets: How to Find Balance and Purpose in Your Life)
Dismissive-Avoidant has their own needs. The Dismissive-Avoidant suffered from moderate to severe emotional neglect as a child, and therefore their subconscious was taught to be autonomous and self-sufficient. Their core wounds revolve around vulnerability feeling painful and feeling a sense of defectiveness. Therefore, their needs in relationships include direct communication and unwavering support.
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
In the case of the Dismissive-Avoidant, it is because of the significant emotional neglect they experienced as a child and their belief that self-reliance is the only way to self-preserve. Identify What Triggers Were Fired How do you identify which of your triggers were activated? You must identify which negative core belief you perceive was validated. Ask yourself: • What do I believe this conflict means? • What am I afraid will happen?
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT & FEARFUL-AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT STYLE This relationship combination can work in some ways, as both partners have many similarities and can have similar coping mechanisms. The Fearful-Avoidant appears warm, is hypersensitive to what others think, and is readily available to please the Dismissive-Avoidant. The Fearful-Avoidant is generally very loving and giving, and the Dismissive-Avoidant can warm up to this connection. However, the Dismissive-Avoidant can be aloof and not want as much closeness as their partner. Even though both styles of attachment cause each partner to derive security from their own individual space, the Fearful-Avoidant’s anxious side is usually triggered by their Dismissive-Avoidant partner, and they will therefore become more anxious and reliant on their partner. The Dismissive-Avoidant will not feel guilt or remorse if space is taken; however, the Fearful-Avoidant may shut down and feel neglected when the Dismissive-Avoidant pulls away. The highs for the Dismissive-Avoidant in this dynamic are that they feel deeply seen, heard, understood, and valued by their Fearful-Avoidant partner. The Dismissive-Avoidant also appreciates that the Fearful-Avoidant needs their space. The lows for the Dismissive-Avoidant in this dynamic are when their Fearful-Avoidant partner becomes emotionally volatile or critical. This can trigger a core wound that arose from feeling emotionally unsafe in childhood and lead them to further assume abandonment will take place.
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
That attachment styles can vary based on type—for example, friendship or a romantic relationship. 2. That how a person behaves in one relationship—for example, with one specific friend—can spread to how they behave in other relationships of that same type—such as with other friends. This concept is important because it truly demonstrates the ability of the subconscious to store and replay beliefs based on repetition and emotion. Now that you understand the fluidity of attachment styles and why they lie along a spectrum, you can begin to discover your dominant attachment style in different areas of your life. Consider how you act and feel in your relationships, whether they are romantic, platonic, or familial. Examine the ratio of activating to deactivating strategies in your thoughts and behaviors. Recall that activating strategies are decisions that are made based on prior information and experiences. Deactivating strategies are actions that drive self-reliance and deny attachment needs altogether, pushing others away. If you have relatively more activating strategies, you may have a greater fear of abandonment and be on the Anxious side of the spectrum. More deactivating strategies may indicate a subconscious belief around complete autonomy, placing you more on the Dismissive-Avoidant side of the attachment scale. Keep in mind that this tool should be used in romantic relationships after the honeymoon phase is over, a phase that occurs during the first two years of the relationship. During the honeymoon phase, your brain has higher levels of dopamine in the caudate nucleus and ventral tegmental regions, according to Scientific American. These areas of the brain are responsible for, respectively, learning and memory and emotional processing. Consequently, your attachment style may be unclear to you in the early phases of your romantic relationship since your emotions, memory, and hormone regulation are atypical. Our experiences can also dramatically alter our attachment style. For example, if Sophie were to partake in certain forms of therapy and practices such as recurrent meditation, she may be able to better understand and re-equilibrate her subconscious beliefs. According to Science Daily, since meditation induces theta brain waves and activates areas of the frontal lobe associated with emotional regulation, Sophie could eventually bring herself into a more Secure attachment space without the help of a Secure partner. However, although it is common to express different attachment styles in different areas of life, the type of attachment you have in relationships ultimately tends to be the attachment style that you associate with the type of relationship. For example, you can be Dismissive-Avoidant in familial relationships because you experienced emotional neglect from parental figures, but you could also be Fearful-Avoidant in romantic relationships due to domestic abuse that has occurred. This illustrates that major events such as betrayal, loss, or abuse can alter our attachment style in different chapters of life, but that ultimately attachment styles are fluid and often dependent on the kind of relationships we are in. We tend to have a primary attachment style, most associated with how we show up in romantic relationships, that plays a large role in our personality structure. This essentially dictates how we give and receive love and what our subconscious expectations are of others.
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
Someone with a Dismissive-Avoidant attachment style will: • Generally appear withdrawn • Be highly independent • Be emotionally distant in their relationships • Be less likely to connect on an intimate level • Find it difficult to be highly involved with their partners • Become overwhelmed when they are relied on heavily • Retreat physically and emotionally as a result Their core beliefs, or the recurring perceptions that replay in their subconscious, will perpetuate a sense of defectiveness and uncertainty in relationships. They essentially believe at an innermost level that they are unsafe around people and that vulnerability always results in pain. Although the Dismissive-Avoidant may appear to have shortcomings in their relationships (as do those with all attachment styles), they can actually be wonderful partners. By having a deeper understanding of why someone is Dismissive-Avoidant, a relationship can be healthier, happier, and more fulfilling. So, why is the Dismissive-Avoidant individual so distant? Adults who are Dismissive-Avoidant typically had parents who were absent from their childhood. This absence can be in the form of physical, emotional, or intellectual abandonment. Since children quite literally depend on their parents for survival, those with neglectful parents have to learn how to self-soothe. Eventually this child is likely to develop a belief that they can only safely rely on themselves. This belief is then subconsciously brought into adulthood and manifests as distant and dismissive behavior. However, this can be remedied over time—a healthy relationship with a Dismissive-Avoidant can be built with consistent emotional support, autonomy, and direct communication.
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
However, when he has issues with being bullied at school, they write it off as a typical childhood experience. Since Ross is doing well academically and is still involved in after-school activities, they do not bother to validate his emotions. Consequently, Ross constantly feels alone and comes to subconsciously believe the only person he can rely on to soothe himself is himself. As you can see, emotional neglect does not necessarily mean a child was physically abandoned—it can include a wider variety of neglect such as absenteeism or a lack of emotional connection between the caregiver and child. Moreover, a Dismissive-Avoidant attachment style can also be formed through a combination of emotional neglect from one parent and enmeshment trauma from the other. According to Thrivetalk, enmeshment trauma is a form of emotional damage that occurs when one or more parents project their values, needs, and dreams onto their child. This causes the child to abandon their own sense of self in order to please their caregiver. Ultimately, the child feels as though they must adapt to their parent’s needs to be worthy of love, and this, when combined with a caregiver who is also unavailable, leaves the child feeling emotionally abandoned. Eventually, the Dismissive-Avoidant wants to dissociate from those around them because they have an abundance of stored subconscious associations around their emotional vulnerability being rejected. In adulthood, they will subconsciously feel in control when they are on their own, and will be at peace alone. In their relationships, they will need time alone to soothe themselves because being alone has the most positive childhood associations. Since the subconscious is most “comfortable” with what it knows, it will actively work to re-create a sense of familiarity. For the Dismissive-Avoidant, this means withdrawing in emotionally challenging situations in adulthood. For those who are in a relationship with the Dismissive-Avoidant, or if you are a Dismissive-Avoidant yourself, issues can arise if this coping mechanism is not mutually understood. Therefore, to begin healing yourself or your relationship, you must first understand where these patterns come from, and then learn the steps to finally heal them.
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
There’s one relationship I’ve neglected my whole life. My relationship with myself. I would never tolerate the things I say to myself if someone else was saying them. I disregard my feelings. I don’t value my desires. I don’t nurture myself. I’m mean. Pleasure is personal and I need to work out what it looks like to me. Giving zero fucks. Having fun. The kind of person who wears things they want to wear, not because it suits their shape. I have so many stupid rules about clothes. I think you should be the kind of person who says what they think. Who feels scared but pushes through and does it anyway. The kind of person who trusts that voice. That intuition voice. That gut voice. The voice that’s telling you that all of this is right. Does cool shit with her hair without worrying about it. Has fantasies that infiltrate her actual life. Just eats what her body craves. Doesn’t start sentences with the word sorry. Tells people to get fucked and who doesn’t spend hours and hours feeling nauseated or anxious or running things over and over again in a guilt fueled spiral. Tries things even when she knows she might be bad at them. Values her own opinion and instinct. Trusts herself. Allows good things to happen and allows herself to make mistakes. Doing what feels good. A quest for more. A pleasure quest.
Claire Christian (It's Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake)
Men who prioritize momentry pleasures and personal obsessions over family time and connection forfeit the privilege of having a family. Their selfish addiction to gym, work, TV, and sports reveals a misguided priority, leaving their loved ones emotionally starved and heartsick. Family is a sacred trust, requiring nurture and presence. Let us not neglect our sacred responsibility, lest we suffer the consequences of a family in pain and a home in shambles.
Shaila Touchton
the Dismissive-Avoidant needs continuous and unwavering emotional support and validation. Since they were emotionally neglected as a child, they need to slowly learn that they can consistently and predictably rely on others.
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
Fearful-Avoidant is generally very loving and giving, and the Dismissive-Avoidant can warm up to this connection. However, the Dismissive-Avoidant can be aloof and not want as much closeness as their partner. Even though both styles of attachment cause each partner to derive security from their own individual space, the Fearful-Avoidant’s anxious side is usually triggered by their Dismissive-Avoidant partner, and they will therefore become more anxious and reliant on their partner. The Dismissive-Avoidant will not feel guilt or remorse if space is taken; however, the Fearful-Avoidant may shut down and feel neglected when the Dismissive-Avoidant pulls away.
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
However, this love often eludes us. And we spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do.
bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
Caretaker. Gains a sense of identity and self-worth through meeting others’ needs in relationships. Believes that the only way to receive love is to be needed by others or to care for them physically or emotionally, often while neglecting their own personal needs or desires. May seek out relationships, experiences, or careers where care is required or may play this role at the first sign of need. The Caretaker’s nervous system is often hypervigilant and in Pleaser mode, scanning the environment to assess the needs of others.
Nicole LePera (How to Be the Love You Seek: Break Cycles, Find Peace, and Heal Your Relationships)
Yes Person. Tends to be agreeable with no expressed preferences in relationships, and is often referred to as a people-pleaser or “pushover.” Regularly engages in codependent dynamics, neglecting their own needs to drop everything for others. Prides themselves on acting “selflessly” (or being a “martyr”) by showing up for others no matter what and often ends up over-giving and under-receiving support and care within their relationships. Regularly adopts the beliefs, habits, and even hobbies of their partners, friends, or family and can feel lost or helpless without others to direct them. The Yes Person’s nervous system is often hypervigilant and in Pleaser mode, constantly putting others before themselves.
Nicole LePera (How to Be the Love You Seek: Break Cycles, Find Peace, and Heal Your Relationships)