“
Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility, and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness--powerless and shame-filled--to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid; above all, they would have to look after children, mortal enemies, in their own homes, they would have to pamper them, feed them, worry about their illnesses, provide the means for their education and their pleasure, and unlike in the world of animals, this would last not just for a season, they would remain slaves of their offspring always, the time of joy was well and truly over for them, they would have to continue to suffer until the end, in pain and with increasing health problems, until they were no longer good for anything and were definitively thrown into the rubbish heap, cumbersome and useless. In return, their children would not be at all grateful, on the contrary their efforts, however strenuous, would never be considered enough, they would, until the bitter end, be considered guilty because of the simple fact of being parents. From this sad life, marked by shame, all joy would be pitilessly banished. When they wanted to draw near to young people's bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted, and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favor of the one that replaced it, a cruel, prolonged holocaust that brought with it no consolation, no comfort, nor any material or emotional compensation.
”
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Michel Houellebecq (The Possibility of an Island)
“
From something as simple as what goes in to a good meatloaf to the not so simple - religion, culture, how you should vote, every damn thing you think or believe, your reactions, your behavior - were partially shaped by who and what your parents were.
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Sandra Brown (Deadline)
“
If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stimuli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species. Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage. Frequently the trick goes awry one way or another, as when the sexual drives and stimuli are homosexual or when other forces-parental interference, mental illness, conflicting responsibilities or mature self-disciplinesupervene to prevent the bonding. On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in whole- hearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows.
”
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
“
God’s love for us is everlasting. That means that God’s love for us existed before we were born and will exist after we have died. It is an eternal love in which we are embraced. Living a spiritual life calls us to claim that eternal love for ourselves so that we can live our temporal loves – for parents, brothers, sisters, teachers, friends, spouses, and all people who become part of our lives – as reflections or refractions of God’s eternal love. No fathers or mothers can love their children perfectly. No husbands or wives can love each other with unlimited love. There is no human love that is not broken somewhere.
When our broken love is the only love we can have, we are easily thrown into despair, but when we can live our broken love as a partial reflection of God’s perfect, unconditional love, we can forgive one another our limitations and enjoy together the love we have to offer.
”
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Henri J.M. Nouwen (Bread for the Journey)
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For, as I have suggested, disruption of the unity of the self is not limited to the cases that come to physicians and institutions for treatment. They accompany every disturbance of normal relations of husband and wife, parent and child, group and group, class and class, nation and nation. Emotional responses are so total as compared with the partial nature of intellectual responses, of ideas and abstract conceptions, that their consequences are more pervasive and enduring. I can, accordingly, think of nothing of greater practical importance than the psychic effects of human relationships, normal and abnormal, should be the object of continues study, including among the consequences the indirect somatic effects.” – The unity of the human being
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John Dewey
“
I need to work on developing a new, less irritable personality. though I suspect that an empty nest would be at least a partial cure, today I resorted to substance abuse.
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Eloisa James
“
What I am describing here is entirely realistic. It is possible to find out one’s own truth in the partial, non-neutral company of such a (therapeutic) companion. In that process one can shed one’s symptoms, free oneself of depression, regain joy in life, break out of the state of constant exhaustion, and experience a resurgence of energy, once that energy is no longer required for the repression of one’s own truth. The point is that the fatigue characteristic of such depression reasserts itself every time we repress strong emotions, play down the memories stored in the body, and refuse them the attention they clamor for. Why
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Alice Miller (The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting)
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I would hate to have parents who were always looking over my shoulder, reading my diary, checking my thoughts. I would hate to be exposed. And so, perhaps, when I say I long to be a pane of glass, I am lying. I long for partial obscurity at the same time that I long for someone to know me.
It is confusing and difficult to be me.
Sometimes I I need to cry in order to release the great welling sadness I feel in my head.
For this I need privacy. I do not want anyone to see me and ask why, almost as much as I would like to be comforted.
Somehow, without ever being present, Matthew has exposed all of this, brought it wriggling to the surface like worms. They gather there now, vaguely nostalgic for the dark.
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Meg Rosoff (Picture Me Gone)
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In a defended state, individuals have learned partially to satisfy their own needs, to fulfill their own goals in fantasy. In imagining that they don’t need anyone, that they are capable of taking care of themselves through self-parenting behaviors, they must react negatively to events and to people who offer real gratification. They become dishonest when they attempt to deceive themselves and others that they still want real satisfaction, real friendship or relationships.
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Robert W. Firestone (The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses)
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But Viv, if I've learned anything at all in the last eight years of my life? It's that people just like to tell themselves stories about where they came from. They can't help themselves. They don't trust the world around them--it's too good for them, or not good enough--so they tell themselves stories about it. They tell themselves an old magician who lives up in the sky made them out of clay and put them here until whenever he makes up his mind to take them out again. Your parents didn't like their creation myth, that's all--it had pain in it, and chaos, and their own parents were ashamed. So they told themselves a story that was at least partially true: about two good people who deserved happy lives. And probably at some point they started to believe that story. But the thing is, really, that it doesn't matter. For your parents or anyone else. It doesn't actually matter where we came from, or where we're going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we're here and how well we do it.
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Katie Coyle (Vivian Apple at the End of the World (Vivian Apple, #1))
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The irreducible, ultimate element in religious faith is the insistence that we are created things; male and female He created them; without God we are nothing. And yet, when men and women have children and become parents, they unmistakably become creators, incompetent, accidental and partial creators, no doubt, but creators none the less. It is their inescapable duty, and, with luck, their occasional delight to care and watch over their creations; even if this creative power is partly illusory because chromosomes and chance decide the whole business, parents cannot act as if it is illusory; they cannot sincerely believe in their ultimate helplessness. They must behave like shepherds, however clumsy, and not like sheep, however well trained.
The Sermon on the Mount is a wonderful, intoxicating sermon. But it is a sermon for bachelors.
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Ferdinand Mount (Subversive Family)
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She played a great deal better than either of the Miss Musgroves; but having no voice, no knowledge of the harp, and no fond parents to sit by and fancy themselves delighted, her performance was little thought of, only out of civility, or to refresh the others, as she was well aware. She knew that when she played she was giving pleasure only to herself; but this was no new sensation: excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, know the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste. In music she had been always used to feel alone in the world; and Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove's fond partiality for their own daughters' performance, and total indifference to any other person's, gave her much more pleasure for their sakes, than mortification for her own.
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Jane Austen
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We weren’t happy together but we lived in a state of easy, mild contentment. We shared everything except the stupid fucking secret hanging round your neck. I imagined tiny photographs: portraits in sepia of your parents, their faces partially obscured by goitres. Meanwhile, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not even in a decade from now but one day: the planet would fall apart.
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Jon Gresham (We Rose Up Slowly)
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While the parent is wholly responsible for calling the children into being, and can exercise a partial control over their minds and actions, he cannot but recognize the essential independence of the entity that he has procreated. The child’s will is perfectly free; if he obeys his father, he does so through love or fear or respect, but not as an automaton, and the good parent would not wish it otherwise.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art)
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The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general. They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage.
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
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It need hardly be said that the qualities which filled Martin with the pangs of hero-worship were not altogether those which David’s parents would have most desired. If he had had to earn his living, David would have been a serious problem. But, owing to the ill-judged partiality of an aunt, he had been independent for some years. So he lived in town and had hankerings for the stage and the cinema and broadcasting, and every now and then his looks and his easy manners and his independent income landed him in a job, though not for long. And, as Martin had dimly surmised, heaps of girls had been in love with him. When the Leslies wished that David would settle down to a job and stick to it, they never failed to remind each other that the house would not be the same if David were not there so often.
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Angela Thirkell (Wild Strawberries (Barsetshire, #2))
“
Herd immunity may never be achieved because high vaccination rates encourage the evolution of more severe disease-causing organisms “A partially effective immune response — enough to exert selective pressure but not effective enough to suppress escape viral mutants — is the most effective driving force of antigenic variation.” Rodpothong P, Auewarakul P. Viral evolution and transmission effectiveness. World J Virol 2012 Oct 12; 1(5): 131-34. In theory, if enough people are vaccinated, herd immunity will be achieved and chains of infection will be disrupted. In reality, a true herd immunity threshold may never be reached within normal heterogenous populations. If a true herd immunity threshold level is achieved, it will create a strong selective pressure that encourages the emergence of mutant viral strains.
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Neil Z Miller (Miller's Review of Critical Vaccine Studies: 400 Important Scientific Papers Summarized for Parents and Researchers)
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(working girls, they called themselves, but they always seemed to be out of work), had come to mix drinks for me and to hold long conversations to which, despite the gravity of the subjects discussed, the partial or total nudity of the speakers gave an attractive simplicity. I ceased moreover to go to this house because, anxious to present a token of my good-will to the woman who kept it and was in need of furniture, I had given her several pieces, notably a big sofa, which I had inherited from my aunt Léonie. I used never to see them, for want of space had prevented my parents from taking them in at home, and they were stored in a warehouse. But as soon as I discovered them again in the house where these women were putting them to their own uses, all the virtues that one had imbibed in the air of my aunt’s room at Combray became apparent to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned them in their helplessness! Had I outraged the dead,
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Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
“
By explaining the precise power that held groups together Freud could also show why groups did not fear danger. The members do not feel that they are alone with their own smallness and helplessness, as they have the powers of the hero-leader with whom they are identified. Natural narcissism-the feeling that the person next to you will die, but not you-is reinforced by trusting dependence on the leader's power. No wonder that hundreds of thousands of men marched up from trenches in the face of blistering gunfire in World War I. They were partially self-hypnotised, so to speak. No wonder men imagine victories against impossible odds: don't they have the omnipotent powers of the parental figure? Why are groups so blind and stupid?-men have always asked. Because they demand illusions, answered Freud, they "constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real." And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. Who transmits this illusion, if not the parents by imparting the macro-lie of the cultural causa-sui? The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory. Furthermore, he makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it. It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully, or like being in psychoanalytic therapy where the analyst doesn't censure you for anything you feel or think. In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. And so we understand the terrifying sadism of group activity.
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Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
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A very young child has no self-command; but, whatever are its emotions, whether fear, or grief, or anger, it endeavours always, by the violence of its outcries, to alarm, as much as it can, the attention of its nurse, or of its parents. While it remains under the custody of such partial protectors, its anger is the first and, perhaps, the only passion which it is taught to moderate. By noise and threatening they are, for their own ease, often obliged to frighten it into good temper; and the passion which incites it to attack, is restrained by that which teaches it to attend to its own safety. When it is old enough to go to school, or to mix with its equals, it soon finds that they have no such indulgent partiality. It naturally wishes to gain their favour, and to avoid their hatred or contempt. Regard even to its own safety teaches it to do so; and it soon finds that it can do so in no other way than by moderating, not only its anger, but all its other passions, to the degree which its play-fellows and companions are likely to be pleased with. It thus enters into the great school of self-command, it studies to be more and more master of itself, and begins to exercise over its own feelings a discipline which the practice of the longest life is very seldom sufficient to bring to complete perfection.
”
”
Adam Smith
“
Hello,” she says. “My name is Amanda Ritter. In this file I will tell you only what you need to know. I am the leader of an organization fighting for justice and peace. This fight has become increasingly more important--and consequently, nearly impossible--in the past few decades. That is because of this.”
Images flash across the wall, almost too fast for me to see. A man on his knees with a gun pressed to his forehead. The woman pointing it at him, her face emotionless.
From a distance, a small person hanging by the neck from a telephone pole.
A hole in the ground the size of a house, full of bodies.
And there are other images too, but they move faster, so I get only impressions of blood and bone and death and cruelty, empty faces, soulless eyes, terrified eyes.
Just when I have had enough, when I feel like I am going to scream if I see any more, the woman reappears on the screen, behind her desk.
“You do not remember any of that,” she says. “But if you are thinking these are the actions of a terrorist group or a tyrannical government regime, you are only partially correct. Half of the people in those pictures, committing those terrible acts, were your neighbors. Your relatives. Your coworkers. The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature itself--or at least what it has become.”
This is what Jeanine was willing to enslave minds and murder people for--to keep us all from knowing. To keep us all ignorant and safe and inside the fence.
There is a part of me that understands.
“That is why you are so important,” Amanda says. “Our struggle against violence and cruelty is only treating the symptoms of a disease, not curing it. You are the cure.
“In order to keep you safe, we devised a way for you to be separated from us. From our water supply. From our technology. From our societal structure. We have formed your society in a particular way in the hope that you will rediscover the moral sense most of us have lost. Over time, we hope that you will begin to change as most of us cannot.
“The reason I am leaving this footage for you is so that you will know when it’s time to help us. You will know that it is time when there are many among you whose minds appear to be more flexible than the others. The name you should give those people is Divergent. Once they become abundant among you, your leaders should give the command for Amity to unlock the gate forever, so that you may emerge from your isolation.”
And that is what my parents wanted to do: to take what we had learned and use it to help others. Abnegation to the end.
“The information in this video is to be restricted to those in government only,” Amanda says. “You are to be a clean slate. But do not forget us.”
She smiles a little.
“I am about to join your number,” she says. “Like the rest of you, I will voluntarily forget my name, my family, and my home. I will take on a new identity, with false memories and a false history. But so that you know the information I have provided you with is accurate, I will tell you the name I am about to take as my own.”
Her smile broadens, and for a moment, I feel that I recognize her.
“My name will be Edith Prior,” she says. “And there is much I am happy to forget.”
Prior.
The video stops. The projector glows blue against the wall. I clutch Tobias’s hand, and there is a moment of silence like a withheld breath.
Then the shouting begins.
”
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Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
“
We receive a fatal imprint in childhood, at the time of our greatest plasticity, of our passive impressionism, of our helplessness before suggestion. In no period has the role of the parents loomed as immense, because we have recognized the determinism, but at the same time an exaggeration in the size of the Enormous Parent does not need to be permanent and irretrievable. The time has come when, having completed the scientific study of the importance of parents, we now must re-establish our power to revoke their imprint, to reverse our patterns, to kill our fatal downward tendencies. We do not remain smaller in suture than our parents. Nature had intended them to shrink progressively in our eyes to human proportions while we reach for our own maturity. Their fallibilities, their errors, their weaknesses were intended to develop our own capacity for parenthood. We were to discover their human weakness not to overwhelm or humiliate them, but to realize the difficulty of their task and awaken our own human protectiveness toward their failures or a respect for their partial achievement. But to place all responsibilities upon them is wrong too. If they gave us handicaps, they also gave us their courage, their obstinacy, their sacrifices, their moments of strength. We cannot forever await from them the sanction to mature, to impose on them our own truths, to resist or perhaps defeat them in our necessity to gain strength.
We cannot always place responsibility outside of ourselves, on parents, nations, the world, society, race, religion. Long ago it was the gods. If we accepted a part of this responsibility we would simultaneously discover our strength. A handicap is not permanent. We are permitted all the fluctuations, metamorphoses which we all so well understand in our scientific studies of psychology.
Character has ceased to be a mystery and we can no longer refuse our responsibility with the excuse that this is an unformed, chaotic, eyeless, unpredictable force which drives, tosses, breaks us at will.
”
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Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955)
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Dear Mom and Dad
How are you? If you are reading this it means your back from the wonderful cruise my brothers and I sent you on for your anniversary. We’re sure you both had a wonderful time. We want you to know that, while you were away, we did almost everything you asked. All but one thing, that is.
We killed the lawn.
We killed it dead.
You asked us not to and we killed it. We killed it with extreme prejudice and no regard for its planty life.
We killed the lawn.
Now we know what you’re thinking: “But sons, whom we love ever so much, how can this be so? We expressly asked you to care for the lawn? The exactly opposite of what you are now conveying to us in an open digital forum.” True enough. We cannot dispute this. However, we have killed the lawn. We have killed it good.
We threw a party and it was quite a good time. We had a moon bounce and beer and games and pirate costumes, oh it was a good time. Were it anyone else’s party that probably would have been enough but, hey, you know us. So we got a foam machine.
A frothy, wet, quite fun yet evidently deadly, foam machine. Now this dastardly devise didn’t kill the lawn per se. We hypothesize it was more that it made the lawn very wet and that dancing in said area for a great many hours over the course of several days did the deed. Our jubilant frolicking simply beat the poor grass into submission.
We collected every beer cap, bottle, and can. There is not a single cigarette butt or cigar to be found. The house is still standing, the dog is still barking, Grandma is still grandmaing but the lawn is no longer lawning.
Now we’re sure, as you return from your wonderful vacation, that you’re quite upset but lets put this in perspective. For one thing whose idea was it for you to leave us alone in the first place? Not your best parenting decision right there. We’re little better than baboons. The mere fact that we haven’t killed each other in years past is, at best, luck.
Secondly, let us not forget, you raised us to be this way. Always pushing out limits, making sure we thought creatively. This is really as much your fault as it is ours, if not more so. If anything we should be very disappointed in you.
Finally lets not forget your cruise was our present to you. We paid for it. If you look at how much that cost and subtract the cost of reseeding the lawn you still came out ahead so, really, what position are you in to complain?
So let’s review; we love you, you enjoyed a week on a cruise because of us, the lawn is dead, and it’s partially your fault.
Glad that’s all out in the open. Can you have dinner ready for us by 6 tonight? We’d like macaroni and cheese.
Love always
Peter, James & Carmine
”
”
Peter F. DiSilvio
“
There are a number of well and wearily trodden paths to a new man... Rather than catching up on your paperwork, you could squeeze in some 'best of a bad lot' power-flirting on the commute to work (and be gutted when, even though you didn't fancy them to begin with, ypur focus knocks you back). Maybe you're considering signing up for online dating or going to places where you should but absolutely never will, meet someone suitable? Since over the last year I've tried them all, I'll share what I've learnt with you. I've sat chatting to Belgian lawyers in Starbucks (willing them to be even a little more interesting); I've dabbled with online dating (where all the guys have done the Nick Hornby's Guide to Women course and are single parents with angelic but troubled kids, or run small, quirky yet failing businesses). I don't even want to think about going to another cultural event (to meet graduates of the Tony Parsons' Guide to Women course: bitterness over ex-wife, partially concealed by exterior of witty self-loathing, which in turn is momentarily obscured by an encyclopaedic knowledge of early punk bands).
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Jennifer Cox (Around the World in 80 Dates: What if Mr. Right Isn't Mr. Right Here, A True Story)
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The next significant incident would change Steven forever: an apartment building fire. Steven and another officer arrived to the sounds of the screams of parents desperately trying to find their children. They ran inside believing there were three children trapped; they scooped them up and ran outside with a feeling of elation and relief. They had saved the children from certain death. The feeling was short lived. A frantic mother approached them, “Where’s my daughter?”
Steven and the other officer tried to reenter the building but the fire had become too intense. All they could do was watch in horror as a partial wall of the building collapsed, revealing the child’s location. They could see and hear her, but they couldn’t save her. Her screams were mixed with the screams of her mother. Eventually her screams were silenced and she was no longer visible. Her mother continued to wail in pain, others dropped to their knees and sobbed while the first responders choked back their own tears and finished their jobs, the emotion overwhelming. Every person on the scene was altered that day. A piece of every one of them became part of the ashes.
”
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Karen Rodwill Solomon (The Price They Pay)
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Families are finding that they are getting funding from a variety of sources. One typical family has counseling covered through their insurance for family counseling, and counseling funded by a federally funded adoption support program for their child. They receive respite care funded through the Division of Developmental Disabilities. They pay privately for Sibshop, a well-loved program for the siblings of their special needs children. Since the Sibshop is through a non-profit organization, it is particularly affordable. Their school district pays for tutoring. After they specifically requested a review, they received an adoption subsidy available to older children through their state. The cost of braces was partially reimbursed by the adoption support system, as well. The combination of resources and financial relief allowed the parents to enjoy some outings, plan a simple family vacation, and get some household help. They said, “Without this help, we would not have made it as an emotionally intact family. We would not have disrupted, but we would not have been the unit that we are today.
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Deborah D. Gray (Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents)
“
Many people have felt the effects of favoritism on the part of parents, teachers, employers, or in other contexts. This is one thing we never need to worry about with our heavenly Father. God loves each one of his children equally. He doesn’t dispense either his favor or his discipline on a whim. If we see another believer who seems to be especially favored, perhaps they’ve positioned themselves to receive more of God’s blessings by obeying his guidelines for living. If someone seems to have a closer relationship with God than we do, it’s probably because they’re more committed to the disciplines that foster spiritual growth. In any case, God never shows partiality; we’re all his favorite children.
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Dianne Neal Matthews (Designed for Devotion: A 365-Day Journey from Genesis to Revelation)
“
The fifteen-minute drive from her son’s parent-teacher conference had been full of introspection, soul-searching, and heartache. It was partially, Kendall felt, the same battle other working mothers waged every day. Do I do enough for my child? It was a conflict that she was sure should have been resolved with her mother’s generation. Yet it was a debate that still plunged a hot needle into her skin. No mom could ever really think she’d done enough—especially if she did anything for herself. That included pursuing a meaningful career, of course. Anyone without a special-needs child is always at the ready to tell those who have one what they ought to do.
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Gregg Olsen (Victim Six (Sheriff Detective Kendall Stark #1))
“
I know nobody’s going to take care of me. I have to make sure that I’ve got things in place. Who will speak for me when I can’t speak for myself? One sister has her own grief. The other I simply do not trust. I’ve thought about bribing my nieces and nephews, who are in my will. Let’s not kid ourselves. Making plans that assure our elder years are managed to our liking and fit within our budget is more crucial for those without children. We know we can’t count on offspring to oversee our dotage. There’s even a name for what we may someday become—elder orphans. “Aging seniors face all sorts of uncertainties,” writes Susan B. Garland in Kiplinger’s Retirement Report. “But older childless singles and couples are missing the fallback that many other seniors take for granted: adult children who can monitor an aging parent and help navigate a complex system of health care, housing, transportation, and social services.” Perhaps we can push planning aside for a while, but then our care may fall to an inattentive relative, acquaintance, or potentially nefarious do-gooder to make decisions for us when we can’t make them ourselves. If we’re really in a jam, some judge will appoint someone to manage our affairs. No one wants to face the fact, but none of us is getting out of here alive. Some steer clear of making plans, procrastinate, or remain in denial that their day will come. Even partial planning risks chaotic consequences. -—-—-—
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Kate Kaufmann (Do You Have Kids?: Life When the Answer Is No)
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Segment of Throat Center. Includes jaws, lower face and mouth. Positive aspects: All forms of energetic expression originate from the lower segments and are allowed to pass freely and fully. Lots of creative ideas and good communication skills, with their expressions unblocked. Can express how you feel, what you want and how you want things to be. Flexibility of voice, singing, shouting, laughing, moaning, facing, giggling. Negative: It can be restricted, even pushed back as much as water in a hose. We can swallow our power and pride, we can stifle our expression, we can "choke" our own words. By muffling self-expression in accordance with the wishes of our parents we may have learnt this. Physical Negative Aspects. Problems regarding exhaustion, digestion and weight. Tension of neck and head in the shoulders and the back. Very common colds, sore throats and infections. Center segment of visualization. 3rd Eye, 6th Chakra. Concentration, the mind and will's strong powers. Imagination, intuition, and perceptions that determine how you and the world around you see yourself. Your eyes are deep self-reflection. The subconscious mind gets imprinted with visions and symbols. Positive aspects: Clarity, vitality, sparkle, insight and the intimacy opportunity. Strong connection with one's self and inner guide. Spiritual open-mindedness. You are approaching a sacred sense. Negotiating. Achievement compulsive. Controlling behavior, denying reality, repetitive thinking and internal dialogues. Forgetting. One hides the partially closed eyes behind them. A tired, lifeless low-energy quality or partial commitment to a passionless cause; lack of direction. A distracted focus that represents a failed purpose. Physical negative aspects: problems with eyes and vision, headaches. Crown Center or (brow segment). Once you unlock, you feel the soul's seat and the world door; cosmic harmony. A vision, or purpose, and inner knowledge, shine forth. To fully realize its potential, this center needs energy from the breath and other centers. A continuous passage from the head to the toe. Aspects which are positive. Beyond this corporeal world into unbridled states of ecstasy. Link of something that is visible and invisible. Extremely clear. A deep sense of wholeness. Negative scores. Undeveloped sense of wholeness and a fundamental confidence. So much logic and analysis. Constantly active and distrustful of one's intuitive powers. Physical negative aspects: Unbalanced hemispheres in the brain. Thyroid, parathyroid, genital, and muscle ailments.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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A few centuries ago, the government of this country became interested in enforcing certain desirable behaviors in its citizens. There had been studies that indicated that violent tendencies could be partially traced to a person’s genes—a gene called ‘the murder gene’ was the first of these, but there were quite a few more, genetic predispositions toward cowardice, dishonesty, low intelligence—all the qualities, in other words, that ultimately contribute to a broken society.” We were taught that the factions were formed to solve a problem, the problem of our flawed natures. Apparently the people David is describing, whoever they were, believed in that problem too. I know so little about genetics—just what I can see passed down from parent to child, in my face and in friends’ faces. I can’t imagine isolating a gene for murder, or cowardice, or dishonesty. Those things seem too nebulous to have a concrete location in a person’s body. But I’m not a scientist. “Obviously there are quite a few factors that determine personality, including a person’s upbringing and experiences,” David continues, “but despite the peace and prosperity that had reigned in this country for nearly a century, it seemed advantageous to our ancestors to reduce the risk of these undesirable qualities showing up in our population by correcting them. In other words, by editing humanity. “That’s how the genetic manipulation experiment was born. It takes several generations for any kind of genetic manipulation to manifest, but people were selected from the general population in large numbers, according to their backgrounds or behavior, and they were given the option to give a gift to our future generations, a genetic alteration that would make their descendants just a little bit better.” I look around at the others. Peter’s mouth is puckered with disdain. Caleb is scowling. Cara’s mouth has fallen open, like she is hungry for answers and intends to eat them from the air. Christina just looks skeptical, one eyebrow raised, and Tobias is staring at his shoes. I feel like I am not hearing anything new—just the same philosophy that spawned the factions, driving people to manipulate their genes instead of separating into virtue-based groups. I understand it. On some level I even agree with it. But I don’t know how it relates to us, here, now.
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Veronica Roth (The Divergent Library: Divergent; Insurgent; Allegiant; Four)
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Adolescence is an inside job. In the 1990s, Suniya S. Luthar, Ph.D., studied adolescents and found that ninth-graders with an internal locus of control - those who felt they had some command over the forces shaping their lives - handled stress better than kids with an external orientation - those who felt others had control over forces shaping their lives...Locus of control is not an all-or-nothing concept. None of us are entirely reliant on one or the other...But more and more often, the teenagers I observe aren't even partially internally motivated. They persistently turn outward toward coaches, teachers, and parents...A startlingly large number of these teens are behaving like younger children. They're stuck performing the chief psychosocial tasks of childhood - being good and doing things right to please adults - instead of taking on the developmental work of separation and independence that is appropriate for their age. When faced with teenage-sized problems, they often have nothing more than the skills of a child.
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Madeline Levine (Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World)
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Sometimes I still wondered what my life could have looked like if I’d done things differently. If I had taken all my dad’s advice when I was younger and been more responsible with my money. It’s the same question I’ve asked about all my consumption tendencies, especially my drinking habits. What could life have looked like if I hadn’t fallen into those traps? But then I remember I had to make those mistakes and learn those lessons in order to become the person I am today. That doesn’t mean my parents’ energy was wasted. If anything, the reason I was able to come to many of these conclusions in my 20s was probably because of everything they’d taught me growing up. When my gut instinct told me I was doing something that was wrong for me, I have to believe that was partially thanks to my parents. Still, I was always going to make some mistakes. It was only after chasing all the things I thought I should have that I realized what I actually wanted.
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Cait Flanders (The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store)
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It’s the same question I’ve asked about all my consumption tendencies, especially my drinking habits. What could life have looked like if I hadn’t fallen into those traps? But then I remember I had to make those mistakes and learn those lessons in order to become the person I am today. That doesn’t mean my parents’ energy was wasted. If anything, the reason I was able to come to many of these conclusions in my 20s was probably because of everything they’d taught me growing up. When my gut instinct told me I was doing something that was wrong for me, I have to believe that was partially thanks to my parents. Still, I was always going to make some mistakes. It was only after chasing all the things I thought I should have that I realized what I actually wanted.
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Cait Flanders (The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store)
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You might be surprised to know that, when looking for a partner, people find minimal alcohol consumption attractive. It's partially subconscious but true. We respect the non-drinker, admiring their character and self-discipline. We even feel they will ultimately make a better partner and parent. The bottom line: Not drinking is sexy!
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Annie Grace (This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life)
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The Frankfurt School theory towards the family is summarised by Jay Martin in a semi-official history of the institution: ‘Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change’.
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Kerry R. Bolton (The Perversion of Normality: From the Marquis de Sade to Cyborgs)
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But my partiality has limits, and I bet yours does too. If I were hurrying home to join my family for dinner and I passed a lost child, I would help the child find his parents, even if it made me a bit late and caused some mild distress to those I love. So strangers have some weight.
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Paul Bloom (Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion)
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The narcissist is a partial adult. He seeks to avoid adulthood. Infantilisation – the discrepancy between one's advanced chronological age and one's retarded behaviour, cognition, and emotional development – is the narcissist's preferred art form. Some narcissists even use a childish tone of voice occasionally and adopt a toddler's body language.
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Sam Vaknin (Narcissistic and Psychopathic Parents And their Children)
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You can think that by saying the right things, or by reading every book on the subject matter, you will somehow reduce your chances of failure and increase your control. But that’s only partially true. You can’t tell where somebody else is in their life. They might just not fancy you, which is deeply unfortunate, but something to be accepted, not fought over, like bad weather.
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Natasha Lunn (Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings)
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The Still-Face paradigm shows viscerally that within seconds of a child perceiving their parent to be disengaged and emotionally absent, they start to feel distress and attempt to reengage the parent. But when these efforts fail, the infant disengages and emotionally withdraws. Imagine the impact on a developing child if that is a continuous experience. A cold, disengaged, partially attentive caregiver can have immediate, and potentially lifelong, toxic effects on the developing child. This child may grow up feeling inadequate, unlovable. Even with many gifts and skills, they will feel they are “not enough” as an adult, and that can lead to a host of maladaptive behaviors including unhealthy forms of attention seeking, self-sabotaging, or even self-destructive behavior.
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Bruce D. Perry (What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
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Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:
Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction…But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.’…Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword…And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with partial approval.
Unlike Maimonides, the children in Tamarin’s experiment were young enough to be innocent. Presumably the savage views they expressed were those of their parents, or the cultural group in which they were brought up. It is, I suppose, not unlikely that Palestinian children, brought up in the same wartorn country, would offer equivalent opinions in the opposite direction. These considerations fill me with despair. They seem to show the immense power of religion, and especially the religious upbringing of children, to divide people and foster historic enmities and hereditary vendettas.
Tamarin ran a fascinating control group in his experiment. A different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same text from the book of Joshua, but with Joshua’s own name replaced by ‘General Lin’ and ‘Israel’ replaced by ‘a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago’. Now the experiment gave opposite results. Only 7 per cent approved of General Lin’s behaviour, and 75 per cent disapproved. In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgements that most modern humans would share.
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Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
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Man escapes abductor after twenty-two years in captivity” The headline stops my breath as I sit with my parents around the dinner table, distracting myself with my phone. “The partially nude man discovered on the side of Abbington Road near Pembrooke has been identified as thirty-year-old Oliver Lynch, the Libertyville boy who went missing on the Fourth of July almost twenty-two years ago.
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Jennifer Hartmann (Still Beating)
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New Haven psychologist Lisa Cross believes that it is no coincidence that these body-control syndromes occur more often in women than in men, and that they all tend to have their onset in adolescence. From birth to death, Cross argues, a female's experience of her body is far more confused and discontinuous than a male's: from her partially hidden genitals to the pain and mystery of menstruation to the abrupt and radical changes in body contours and function associated with puberty and childbearing to the symbiotic possession of her body by another life during pregnancy and breast-feeding. As a result, some women see their bodies as fragmented, foreign, unfamiliar, frightening, and out of control—as object, not subject, as Cross puts it. Add in social and cultural pressures—which lead teenage girls to define their bodies by their attractiveness, while boys define theirs by strength and function—and it is easy to understand what a perilous passage puberty can be for young women. In fact, it is puberty that first introduces bleeding and body fat into a girl's life, two very powerful symbols of the loss of control over her body. The psychological chasm between body and self widens when girls must negotiate these challenges in an environment fraught with the pain and terror of physical or sexual abuse or unempathetic parenting. "Self-cutting and eating disorders, as bizarre and self-destructive as they can appear, are nonetheless attempts to own the body, to perceive the body as self (not other), known (not uncharted and unpredictable), and impenetrable (not invaded or controlled from the outside)," Cross theorizes.
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Marilee Strong (A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain)
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Being Your Own Placebo Medical advances depend on knowing reliably what works and what doesn’t. No one wants to take an ineffective drug or supplement. Perhaps you’re considering an over-the-counter homeopathic product. Will it work for you? Is it acceptable if it works for only a percentage of people? These are basic questions, but there is an X factor to consider. If you take the homeopathic and feel better from it, maybe the physical product isn’t actually causing the improvement, but only your belief that it would. The fact is that your beliefs, your conditioning since childhood, and even the genes you inherited from your parents belong to the X factor. The homeopathic—or any other drug or supplement—only partially determines how you will respond to treatment. The placebo effect, which brings healing totally without an active medical ingredient, is very enticing. If you could be your own placebo, the safest form of healing would be at your disposal. Every cell in your body knows exactly what it needs and takes nothing else. Could this be true of the bodymind as a whole? If so, we would only need to contact the level of the self that totally supports our cells, consciously offering what they need. Before deciding if that’s a realistic possibility, let’s look deeper into the whole phenomenon. Among physicians, the placebo effect has been fascinating, confusing, and frustrating at the same time. In practice, few if any doctors would dare to treat a patient with a dummy pill in place of the real thing. But in clinical drug trials the placebo effect must be ruled out; otherwise, the efficacy of the drug can’t be known.
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Deepak Chopra (The Healing Self: Supercharge your immune system and stay well for life)
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Hello,” she says. “My name is Amanda Ritter. In this file I will tell you only what you need to know. I am the leader of an organization fighting for justice and peace. This fight has become increasingly more important—and consequently, nearly impossible—in the past few decades. That is because of this.” Images flash across the wall, almost too fast for me to see. A man on his knees with a gun pressed to his forehead. The woman pointing it at him, her face emotionless. From a distance, a small person hanging by the neck from a telephone pole. A hole in the ground the size of a house, full of bodies. And there are other images too, but they move faster, so I get only impressions of blood and bone and death and cruelty, empty faces, soulless eyes, terrified eyes. Just when I have had enough, when I feel like I am going to scream if I see any more, the woman reappears on the screen, behind her desk. “You do not remember any of that,” she says. “But if you are thinking these are the actions of a terrorist group or a tyrannical government regime, you are only partially correct. Half of the people in those pictures, committing those terrible acts, were your neighbors. Your relatives. Your coworkers. The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature itself—or at least what it has become.” This is what Jeanine was willing to enslave minds and murder people for—to keep us all from knowing. To keep us all ignorant and safe and inside the fence. There is a part of me that understands. “That is why you are so important,” Amanda says. “Our struggle against violence and cruelty is only treating the symptoms of a disease, not curing it. You are the cure. “In order to keep you safe, we devised a way for you to be separated from us. From our water supply. From our technology. From our societal structure. We have formed your society in a particular way in the hope that you will rediscover the moral sense most of us have lost. Over time, we hope that you will begin to change as most of us cannot. “The reason I am leaving this footage for you is so that you will know when it’s time to help us. You will know that it is time when there are many among you whose minds appear to be more flexible than the others. The name you should give those people is Divergent. Once they become abundant among you, your leaders should give the command for Amity to unlock the gate forever, so that you may emerge from your isolation.” And that is what my parents wanted to do: to take what we had learned and use it to help others. Abnegation to the end. “The information in this video is to be restricted to those in government only,” Amanda says. “You are to be a clean slate. But do not forget us.” She smiles a little. “I am about to join your number,” she says. “Like the rest of you, I will voluntarily forget my name, my family, and my home. I will take on a new identity, with false memories and a false history. But so that you know the information I have provided you with is accurate, I will tell you the name I am about to take as my own.” Her smile broadens, and for a moment, I feel that I recognize her. “My name will be Edith Prior,” she says. “And there is much I am happy to forget.” Prior.
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Veronica Roth (The Divergent Series: Complete Collection)
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Crying It Out (Extinction) The optimal time to use this strategy is after three to four months of age (post–due date). Perhaps this is when both parents must return to work full-time or with postcolicky infants (colic usually starts to dissipate at three to four months) or after parents see partial success with graduated extinction. Extinction can successfully be used earlier, but most parents find it unacceptably harsh for younger babies. Extinction was used with some twins in my survey at five to six months of age after the due date, when the parents had suffered from becoming desperately sleep-deprived. At three to four months, many parents in my survey used extinction successfully. Extinction means open-ended crying at night. The process is pretty straightforward: if you know that it is time to sleep and not time to feed, you ignore the crying, without a time limit. Initially, the baby will fall asleep after wearing herself out crying, but very quickly this process teaches the baby how to fall asleep unassisted without protest or crying. And the baby then stays asleep for a longer time. A major fear here is that prolonged crying by one twin will disturb the sleeping of the other. Parents in my survey stated that the sleepy twin, surprisingly, almost always adapted to the crying after a few nights and slept through their sibling’s protests. Of course, another major fear is that you will harm your child by letting him cry. But as long as he is safely in his crib, letting him cry is only a means to an end of better sleeping. There is no published research showing that this procedure causes any harm to children. In contrast, there is no question that not sleeping well truly harms them. If your twins’ bedtime is early and naps are in place, the process of extinction usually takes three to five nights. In general, the parents in my survey describe the first night’s crying to be thirty to forty-five minutes, the second night’s ten to thirty minutes, and the third night’s zero to ten minutes. If their bedtime is too late or a twin is not napping well, the process may take much longer, or it may appear to work but the success is short-lived. Sometimes older children cry more on the second night than on the first, but the entire process still takes just a few days. “We started around three or four months as fatigue from care and unpredictable sleep schedules reached the breaking point. The first night, our babies cried for about twenty minutes; the second for about ten minutes. They’ve slept through the night ever since.
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Marc Weissbluth (Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Twins: A Step-by-Step Program for Sleep-Training Your Multiples)
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No, we need precisely the opposite: a partial companion, someone who can share with us the horror and indignation that is bound to arise when our emotions gradually reveal to her, and to us, how the little child suffered, what it went through all alone when body and soul were fighting for years on end to preserve a life threatened by constant danger.
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Alice Miller (The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting)
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Adopting a stance toward any external experience as partial rather than total allows the feeling to more easily be accepted. Thus, recognizing my shame as part of me allows me to tolerate it far better than if I am all shame. Allowing the hating of a parent comes easier when there also is a loving part. Getting to know each part, like a critical part, or a blocked or blocking part, is facilitated by seeing it as an aspect of myself that I can get to know and can have a relationship with rather than being totally identified with it. Seeing aspects of experience as part of oneself becomes a crucial aspect of change in EFT: It implies possibilities of alternatives because my fear or my sense of worthlessness or unlovableness is only a part of me. VIEW
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Leslie S. Greenberg (Emotion-Focused Therapy (Theories of Psychotherapy))
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In this way we can create in our own selves a person who can satisfy at least some of the needs that have been waiting for fulfillment since birth, if not earlier. Then we can give ourselves the attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, the sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us. To make this happen, we need one special experience: the experience of love for the child we once were. Without it, we have no way of knowing what love consists of. If we want to achieve this experience with the help of therapy, then we need assistance from a therapist who can accept us for what we are, who can give us the protection, respect, sympathy, and understanding we need in order to realize how we have become what we are. This is the fundamental experience that enables us to adopt the role of parents for the wronged children we once were. What we do not need is an educator, someone who “has plans” for us, nor a psychoanalyst who has learned that in the face of childhood traumas the main thing is to remain neutral and interpret the analysand’s reports as fantasies. No, we need precisely the opposite: a partial companion, someone who can share with us the horror and indignation that is bound to arise when our emotions gradually reveal to her, and to us, how the little child suffered, what it went through all alone when body and soul were fighting for years on end to preserve a life threatened by constant danger. We need such a companion—what I have called an “enlightened witness”—if we ourselves are to act as companions for the child within, if we are to understand its “body language,” to engage with its needs instead of ignoring them in the same way that our parents once did.
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Alice Miller (The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting)
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Could it be that the lives we have so carefully crafted are largely just a product of arbitrary coherence? Could it be that we made arbitrary decisions at some point in the past (like the goslings that adopted Lorenz as their parent) and have built our lives on them ever since, assuming that the original decisions were wise? Is that how we chose our careers, our spouses, the clothes we wear, and the way we style our hair? Were they smart decisions in the first place? Or were they partially random first imprints that have run wild?
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Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
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Moreover, the child of parents who have a bad relationship will be unfilial. This is natural. Even the birds and beasts are affected by what they are used to seeing and hearing from the time they are born. Also, the relationship between father and child may deteriorate because of a mother’s foolishness. A mother loves her child above all things, and will be partial to the child that is corrected by his father. If she becomes the child’s ally, there will be discord between father and son. Because of the shallowness of her mind, a woman sees the child as her support in old age.
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Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai)
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It is both the intention and the capability (love-food) that is necessary to sustain a small person in growth toward maturity. Parental mistreatment, that is, the absence of parental love, causes the child psychic pain. These traumatic episodes are later partially or totally repressed, but the scars of these early wounds play a significant part in the everyday life
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Robert W. Firestone (The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses)
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Throughout my childhood, I often struggled to understand myself as Korean in part because my white family, encouraged by "experts," did not see my race or theirs as relevant within our household or outside it. I cannot recall a single conversation we had about anti-Asian prejudice, specifically - not the model-minority myth, not perpetual-foreigner syndrome, not the exotification and fetishization of Asian women, not the legacy of America's imperialist wars that was partially responsible for my birth family's and my presence here. The closest we came to talking about race when I was a child was my parents' assertion that they would have adopted me whether I was black, white, or purple with polka dots.
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Nicole Chung (A Living Remedy: A Memoir)
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Unfortunately, a child often has the experience of being injured when one or both parents do not support her normal developmental needs and impulses. When we talk about needs, what are we talking about? An important example would be the need to stay connected or attached to the caretaker. Besides all the impulses a child has to make to maintain this attachment, the child also has impulses toward exploring, creating an identity, and becoming competent in the world. When these needs and impulses develop, our caretakers can support them or they can not support them, totally or partially.
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Harville Hendrix (Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved (A Guide to Love and Relationships))