Problematic Family Quotes

The world has a fast-growing problematic disability, which forges bonds in families, causes people to communicate in direct and clear ways, cuts down meaningless social interaction, pushes people to the limit with learning about themselves, whilst making them work together to make a better world. It’s called Autism – and I can’t see anything wrong with it, can you? Boy I’m glad I also have this disability!

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes—for a while, at least—be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love.

I have argued that this sort of thinking is problematic in at least two regards: First, the notion that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in continued existence—that they do not have an interest in their lives—involves relying on a speciesist concept of what sort of self-awareness matters morally. I have argued that every sentient being necessarily has an interest in continued existence—every sentient being values her or his life—and that to say that only those animals (human animals) who have a particular sort of self-awareness have an interest in not being treated as commodities begs the fundamental moral question. Even if, as some maintain, nonhuman animals live in an “eternal present”—and I think that is empirically not the case at the very least for most of the nonhumans we routinely exploit who do have memories of the past and a sense of the future—they have, in each moment, an interest in continuing to exist. To say that this does not count morally is simply speciesist. Second, even if animals do not have an interest in continuing to live and only have interests in not suffering, the notion that, as a practical matter, we will ever be able to accord those interests the morally required weight is simply fantasy. The notion that we property owners are ever going to accord any sort of significant weight to the interests of property in not suffering is simply unrealistic. Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is it possible as a matter of practicality in the real world. Absolutely not. Welfarists often talk about treating “farmed animals” in the way that we treat dogs and cats whom we love and regard as members of our family. Does anyone really think that is practically possible? The fact that we would not think of eating our dogs and cats is some indication that it is not.

Healing imagery is also problematic because it implies that the damage being done is primarily emotional. The goal becomes one of "getting along" better by being nicer and more tolerant toward one another, forgiving and forgetting, living in more authentic ways. I don’t object to this goal, but it ignores the fact that a lot of the trouble doesn’t begin and end with interpersonal relations and emotional wounds. Much of it is embedded in structures of power and inequality that shape almost every aspect of life in this society, from economics to politics to religion to schools and the family. The idea that we’re going to get out of this by somehow getting to a place where we’re kinder and more sensitive to one another ignores most of what we have to overcome. It sets us up to walk right past the trouble toward an alternative that doesn’t exist and can’t exist until we do something about what creates privilege and oppression in the first place. And that is something that needs to be changed, not healed.

To me, those are core American family values: cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it- what’s more American than that?

Many other products, while not rationed, were nonetheless in short supply. A visiting American found that he could buy chocolate cake and a lemon meringue pie at Selfridges, but cocoa was impossible to find. Shortages made some realms of hygiene more problematic. Women found tampons increasingly difficult to acquire. At least one brand of toilet paper was also in perilously short supply, as the king himself discovered. He managed to sidestep this particular scarcity by arranging shipments direct from the British embassy in Washington, D.C. With kingly discretion, he wrote to his ambassador, “We are getting short of a certain type of paper which is made in America and is unprocurable here. A packet or two of 500 sheets at intervals would be most acceptable. You will understand this and its name begins with B!!!” The paper in question was identified by historian Andrew Roberts as Bromo soft lavatory paper.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

For those of us who were female, the body was also defined by its role as a potential mother. That’s true in every class but becomes more problematic in the context of financial struggle. Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and their children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.

Beyond the family or particular Christian tradition, how much effort do we make to consider what the Mennonites or the Episcopalians, the Baptists or the Pentecostals, the Methodists or the Presbyterians have to say to the rest of us out of their DIFFERENCES, as well as out of the affirmation in common with other Christians? As I suggested earlier, our patterns of ecumenicity tend to bracket out our differences rather than to celebrate and capitalize upon them. Finding common ground has been the necessary first step in ecumenical relations and activity. But the next step is to acknowledge and enjoy what God has done elsewhere in the Body of Christ. And if at the congregational level we are willing to say, 'I can't do everything myself, for I am an ear: I must consult with a hand or an eye on this matter,' I suggest that we do the same among whole traditions. If we do not regularly and programmatically consult with each other, we are tacitly claiming that we have no need of each other, and that all the truth, beauty, and goodness we need has been vouchsafed to us by God already. Not only is such an attitude problematic in terms of our flourishing, as I have asserted, but in this context now we must recognize how useless a picture this presents to the rest of society. Baptists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics failing to celebrate diversity provide no positive examples to societies trying to understand how to celebrate diversity on larger scales.

model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators. While the choices in Google Maps and avionics software appear cut and dried, others are far more problematic. The value-added model in Washington, D.C., schools, to return to that example, evaluates teachers largely on the basis of students’ test scores, while ignoring how much the teachers engage the students, work on specific skills, deal with classroom management, or help students with personal and family problems. It’s overly simple, sacrificing accuracy and insight for efficiency.

She was different from other women in several regards: he wanted to spend time with her, not just in bed, but in the parlor, in the kitchen, in the stables. He liked simply to watch her, whether she was tending the baby, puttering with her baking, or braiding up her hair by the light of the dying fire. This difference might have borne potential for a broader relationship, except Sophie wasn’t looking for marriage. And while Vim had to admit marriage to Sophie would be highly problematic—she would want to dwell here in the south, among her family, when just visiting in Kent was a rare act of will for him—her indifference in this regard still rankled. When

Kevin D. Williamson in a sneering screed published in March 2016 in National Review, a leading conservative journal: The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. For

Yet, as beneficial as it can be, giving respect is often a difficult concession for people to make. In a problematic situation or relationship, respect may be the last thing we feel like giving. We may think that they do not deserve our respect and that they need to earn it. They may not be respecting us, so why should we respect them? If we feel rejected, as the union leader did, we naturally reject back. If we feel excluded, we naturally exclude back. If we feel attacked, we attack back. Out of pain, we cause pain. It is a mutually destructive cycle that has no end as I have witnessed countless times from families to businesses to communities to entire societies. The usual results are losses all around.

In 2011, actor Johnny Depp told the November issue of Vanity Fair that he felt participating in a photoshoot was akin to rape. "Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped . . . It feels like a kind of weird - just weird, man. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like - you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid," he said. Likening instances of being flustered or uneasy to the often life-shattering experience of rape has become a far too common comparison in modern lexicon. The phrase "Facebook rape" is perhaps the most widely used, which implies one person has posted on another person's Facebook account - usually something intended to embarrass the person. But the casual, flippant use of the term "rape" in instances that do not involve sexual violence is highly problematic in that it trivialises one of the most despicable invasions of a human being. Desensitising the masses to the term "rape" is just another way the conversation surrounding sexual assault is derailed or diluted in society. Rape is, and should be considered universally, as a serious societal sickness that occurs within the "toxic silence" that surrounds sexual assault as Tara Moss put so elegantly in her recent Q&A appearance. Further to that, the use of the term can be a trigger for rape survivors in that it may jolt terrifying memories of their own experience. According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, up to 57 per cent of rape survivors suffer post-traumatic stress disorder in their lifetime, with "triggers" including inflammatory words like rape causing deeply traumatic recollections. Beware desensitising the term "rape", Newcastle Herald, June 6, 2014

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

continuing clandestinely to publish as Réage, while she also maintained her professional and familial roles as Aury and Desclos. For me, the startling and stimulating fact is the seriousness with which she played the game of identity, and that she apparently played it on terms she herself posed and maintained. I would like to consider how her text itself acts out a splitting, a severance within the structure or texture of identity. For me this split is the site of an extreme readerly discomfort, as well as an identification. The heroine O’s participation in her own erotic identity as a nilling is as problematic as it is compelling.

Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in

It is inappropriate to call child protection "care" when experiences of the system are not "care"-like for everyone. "Care" essentializes the softening of a system that has a violent colonial history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and has continued to feed its children into pipelines of homelessness and housing instability, poverty, prison and other problematic and violent systems. It fails to acknowledge that it is a system, one of which is plagued with the overrepresentation of Indigenous and Black children and families, a system built on white colonial racist values. "Care" as a word minimizes and erases the inequitable realities children, young people, families, and communities face across, not only the province of Ontario, but across the Nation. Child Protection System.

Those in the system who have the clarity or courage to act as whistle blowers, who attempt to reveal the truth of the family pathology, may be perceived by the family, which is steeped in denial, as in some way problematic. Naming the dysfunctional behavior becomes the sin, not the dysfunctional behavior itself. These members may be cut off, humiliated, or even hated if they get too close to the truth, though much of this may be unconscious.

More families should watch the Olympics together. To me, those are core American family values: Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it—what’s more American than that?

Co-dependent individuals often deny their own healthy needs, and attempt to save or rescue the “problematic” person in the family system (e.g., the alcoholic) whether by denial of the problem or by repeatedly rescuing them with caregiving or money and other resources.

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality and their unpopular, awkward or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of and can win the goodwill of others, if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicatiors must have been blessed with caregivers who knew to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offsping might sometimes - for a while, at least - be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life.

WHITE SOLIDARITY White solidarity is the unspoken agreement among whites to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racially problematic. Educational researcher Christine Sleeter describes this solidarity as white “racial bonding.” She observes that when whites interact, they affirm “a common stance on race-related issues, legitimating particular interpretations of groups of color, and drawing conspiratorial we-they boundaries.”10 White solidarity requires both silence about anything that exposes the advantages of the white position and tacit agreement to remain racially united in the protection of white supremacy. To break white solidarity is to break rank. We see white solidarity at the dinner table, at parties, and in work settings. Many of us can relate to the big family dinner at which Uncle Bob says something racially offensive. Everyone cringes but no one challenges him because nobody wants to ruin the dinner. Or the party where someone tells a racist joke but we keep silent because we don’t want to be accused of being too politically correct and be told to lighten up. In the workplace, we avoid naming racism for the same reasons, in addition to wanting to be seen as a team player and to avoid anything that may jeopardize our career advancement. All these familiar scenarios are examples of white solidarity. (Why speaking up about racism would ruin the ambiance or threaten our career advancement is something we might want to talk about.) The very real consequences of breaking white solidarity play a fundamental role in maintaining white supremacy. We do indeed risk censure and other penalties from our fellow whites. We might be accused of being politically correct or might be perceived as angry, humorless, combative, and not suited to go far in an organization. In my own life, these penalties have worked as a form of social coercion. Seeking to avoid conflict and wanting to be liked, I have chosen silence all too often. Conversely, when I kept quiet about racism, I was rewarded with social capital such as being seen as fun, cooperative, and a team player. Notice that within a white supremacist society, I am rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when I do. I can justify my silence by telling myself that at least I am not the one who made the joke and that therefore I am not at fault. But my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the racial hierarchy and my place within it. Each uninterrupted joke furthers the circulation of racism through the culture, and the ability for the joke to circulate depends on my complicity. People of color certainly experience white solidarity as a form of racism, wherein we fail to hold each other accountable, to challenge racism when we see it, or to support people of color in the struggle for racial justice.

Family therapists view the therapeutic relationship as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. Family therapists see beyond the problematic patterns in the family to the potential healing power of family relationships.

Each person pulled onto the slave ship embodied a social history: one or more distinctive places that were called ‘home’ and an indelible web of relationships comprising ties with immediate family and the extended network of kin. A collective of people suddenly torn from participation in these and other domains of social life, the slave cargo was, necessarily, a novel and problematic social configuration. Atlantic commodification meant not only exclusion from that which was recognizable as community, but also immersion in a collective whose most distinguishing feature was its unnatural constitution: it brought strangers together in anomalous intimacy. A product of violence, the slave cargo constituted the antithesis of community.

What happens when children become secondary to a greater good is similar to the neglect that happens to children in families where one parent is addicted to drugs, alcohol, work, or money. Religious devotion, however, tends to involve both parents and can thus be especially problematic. Even more troublesome is the insistence that devotion is a higher calling. Children cannot question this without feeling guilty, selfish, or absurd. With other kinds of neglect, society is more likely to respond with censure or punishment, require treatment or suggest alternatives, but this kind of intervention is very unlikely within a religious family system.

We know that while AVP may be the least problematic of the personality disorders, it can have serious consequences in the lives of close family members, and particularly the significant other. Treatment can be initiated by an AVP, but often the focus is on other “symptoms,” such as failed relationships, anxiety, or depression. More often, treatment is initiated by the AVP’s significant other.

family, tribe, religion, etc.17 Sadly, for many people the experience of trauma is chronic, that is—repeated and layered over time. This is often referred to as complex trauma. Complex trauma is especially problematic when it occurs within early family life, which is an

Accepting that the Gospels are problematic sources, we can still sketch Jesus's life and teachings. The evidence puts him among the Jewish peasantry of first-century Palestine. He was born ca. 4 BCE, more likely in or around Nazareth than in Bethlehem, given both widespread doubts about the historicity of Matthew's and Luke's Nativity narratives and recognition of their apologetic aims. He came from a family of modest means, spoke Aramaic, and worked as a carpenter or builder. At about age thirty, he was baptized by an itinerant preacher named John, after which he spent one (or more) years in the Galilee, gaining disciples and sometimes teaching in synagogues. By all accounts he moved easily among and displayed great compassion for people at society's margins. He fomented a major disturbance in Jerusalem, for which he was executed. Some of what Jesus taught was already familiar—the Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12) parallels a saying of the Jewish sage Hillel, his elder contemporary—but much represented a distinctive message about "the kingdom of God," a highly disputed term that many researchers understand as a place and time to come in which God will reign supreme. Heavenly or earthly, future or present, the kingdom would be ushered in by the "Son of Man," an apocalyptic figure whom Jesus may—or may not—have identified as himself. The kingdom's advent is imminent and would occasion a catastrophe, leading to a universal judgment of each person's fitness to enter it that would radically remake the social order. Mark 1:15 offers a concise precis: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come, repent, and believe the good news.

In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and around. Half of the participants were “pathological gamblers”—people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at a casino— while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors. Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align. None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity. “We were particularly interested in looking at the brain systems involved in habits and addictions,” Habib told me. “What we found was that, neurologically speaking, pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When the symbols lined up, even though they didn’t actually win any money, the areas in their brains related to emotion and reward were much more active than in non-pathological gamblers. “But what was really interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.” Two groups saw the exact same event, but from a neurological perspective, they viewed it differently. People with gambling problems got a mental high from the near misses—which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits that prompt them to put down another bet. The nonproblem gamblers, when they saw a near miss, got a dose of apprehension that triggered a different habit, the one that says I should quit before it gets worse.

After so many years of belittling and mistreatment in a dysfunctional family, you might find yourself drinking up the encouragement like nectar from heaven. In fact, the pictures you show yourself in your mind can be even more powerful in their influence of your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors.  When you’re doing simple tasks like washing dishes or cleaning, try to notice what kinds of pictures go through your mind—especially the pictures that are related to problematic issues in your life.  With some attention and practice, you can change the pictures in your mind to images that are much more conducive to creating the life you want to live.

We often see people who do things that look a bit crazy. We see somebody all the time not succeeding at things they could succeed at, or they are pulling out of relationships that looked promising, or they are putting up a wall when anyone tries to love them, or they’re sabotaging their chances, or whatever. And we think “Why does that person do it, it’s completely crazy, there’s no logic to it?” Here’s a very important point, there is always a point. Those behaviors once upon a time made great sense. I want to go further, not only did they make great sense, they were very often the difference between life and death, between managing to continue with life and giving up on life. We needed those patterns. Imagine someone growing up with a parent who is suicidal, they are threatening suicide, how on Earth does a child survive that experience? One of the ways they might learn to survive that experience is to shut down completely, right? They will never ever let anyone in because to let someone in is to risk their own annihilation. That when you’re 5 years old, to work that out, that is near genius, to work out that in order to survive you need to shut the drawbridge very tight. Fast forward 25, 35, 45, family situation resolved itself in whatever way, and you’ve moved on and you’re trying to have relationships or whatever, but in a horrible way that defense mechanism is still active, and now it’s trouble because now it means that when somebody comes along and says “Oh we could have a relationship”, “Umm, no not possible” because the drawbridge is still shut so a lot of the behavior that is suboptimal in adult life, once had a logic which we don’t understand, and we’re not sympathetic to it, we don’t even see it, but if we can learn to see that logic we can largely then come to unpick it. Or imagine somebody who, let’s say, we all know these people, who can’t stop joking around, somebody who is completely optimistic and sunny and even when something’s sad they’re at a funeral, they make a joke around the casket, and you go “Why are you not able to get in touch with your sadness?” Again imagine that former child has come through a journey where once upon a time it was absolutely essential that they be the clown and cheer up maybe a depressive mother or a father who was very angry and couldn’t find anything optimistic. That child needed to become a clown to get to the next stage of life, but now that precise behavior starts to be extremely negative. Another thing that children constantly do, is when children are brought up in suboptimal surroundings with parents who maybe are not that nice to them, it would be devastating to the child to have to see that the fault lies with their parent. Right? To imagine when you’re a four-year-old that your father or mother is really not a very nice person and maybe really quite disturbed and kind of awful, this is an unbearable thought. This was the pioneering work of the Scottish Psychoanalyst Ronald Faban. He was working with very deprived people in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 1930s and he arrived at a fascinating conclusion. He talked to children from the most deprived most violent abusive families and he discovered that those children spoke very highly of their parents, they would say “My father is a great man”, this is the guy who was hitting the child, “My mother, she’s amazing”, mother you know left the kid unclean and unfed for days. In Faben’s view, it’s better to think that you are the problem than that you’ve been born into a problematic situation, so what happens when you’re in a suboptimal parental situation, is you start to hate yourself, and blame yourself and feel bad about yourself because it is preferable to the other bit of really bad news which is to think that you’ve been born into such an inadequate family, that you may not survive it.

Many organs in our bodies make molecules and release them into our bloodstream as a way to talk with other organs. These endocrine organs include the pancreas, the pituitary gland, the ovaries, and the testes. But few had thought of muscle as an endocrine organ until Pedersen’s work. Interleukin-6 was just the start. Scientists have now discovered over a hundred molecules that our muscles make and release into the blood as we walk. Pedersen’s team discovered that one of these, oncostatin M, shrank breast tissue tumors in mice and could be yet another reason why exercise is beneficial to humans with breast cancer. In 2003, Pedersen coined a name for this amazing family of molecules: myokines. As a myokine, interleukin-6 is an anti-inflammatory. Among other roles, it helps shut down the problematic tumor necrosis factor (TNF). It is the body’s natural ibuprofen. Pedersen’s team also discovered that interleukin-6 can mobilize cells called “natural killers” to attack and destroy cancerous tumors, at least in mice. For some reason, this myokine needs to be produced by muscles during exercise in order to work. But that does not require walking. Can the 3 million Americans in wheelchairs generate myokines? Yes. Researchers at the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Wakayama Medical University in Japan have discovered elevated interleukin-6 levels, and lowered tumor necrosis factor, after wheelchair half-marathons and basketball games. As Juliette Rizzo, 2005 Ms. Wheelchair America, said, “Walking is a way to get from A to B, and I do that.” Myokines, however, are not magic potions. They cannot be injected or swallowed. They are made only when the body is in motion, and in modern societies it often is not.

When I came to view problematic behaviors as adaptive responses and not purposeful misbehavior I shifted nearly all of my beliefs about how to help children and families.

Most people don’t know they have one, because they have never put it into words. They are made up of vague feelings, unspoken apprehensions, the things we didn’t dare talk about or even admit to ourselves as children. They deal with the most powerful and problematic forces in human life, like sex and aggression, which most families find too formidable to discuss. So we develop complex ideas about the nature of reality, which we never communicate and never examine. Someone said that God created the world in a fit of absentmindedness. We do almost as well. We build worldviews half asleep and let them, like tinted lenses, color our lives.