Problematic Relationship Quotes

Emotional predictive profiling may help identify contingent fissures in the stature of endangered relationships. Still and all, it might be wise to let the genie out of problematic bottles in the first place, in advance of scouting the causes of surreptitious subliminal convulsions. ("Beware of the neighbor")

Johnny Cash had all of the same talents and problems as Elvis - a poor upbringing in the rural South exposure to gospel music throughout his childhood a penchant for drug abuse...they had the same sort of influencing experiences but Johnny' Cash's problematic relationship was with his father not his mother. If he had had the mommy issues that Elvis had instead of a compelling need to prove himself to his father, he wouldn't have been the badass man in black, the guy in Folsom Prison watching the train roll by. Elvis was a lot of things but even with the karate and the gunplay he was more unstable than badass.

Page 142: "When a spouse says to the alcoholic, "you need to go to AA," that is obviously not true. The addict feels no need to do that at all, and isn't. But when she says, "I am moving out and will be open to getting back together when you are getting treatment for your addiction," then all of a sudden the addict feels "I need to get some help or I am going to lose my marriage." The need has been transferred. It is the same with any kind of problematic behavior of a person who is not taking feedback and ownership. The need and drive to do something about it must be transferred to that person, and that is done through having consequences that finally make him feel the pain instead of others. When he feels the pain, he will feel the need to change...A plan that has hope is one that limits your exposure to the foolish person's issues and forces him to feel the consequences of his performance so that he might have hope of waking up and changing.

When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us.

Relaxing the shoulders is vital for relaxation in general. However, owing to the effects of gravity, relaxation is problematic unless we let the shoulders remain in their natural place. Let the shoulders drop, or settle in harmony with gravity, into their most comfortable position. It isn’t too difficult to do this for a moment, but to sustain this condition unconsciously in our lives is another matter. We raise our shoulders unnaturally when we lean on a desk or hold the telephone between our shoulders and ears, when we are shocked by a loud noise, and who knows how many other times throughout the day. And the unsettling of the shoulders doesn’t have to be large to produce anxiety, stiff necks, and headaches. Just slightly raising them will create tension, and this tension throws the nervous system out of balance. When do we raise the shoulders in daily life? What are we feeling at that moment and leading up to that moment? Remembering that the body reflects the mind, and that the raising of the shoulders not only creates tension but also is a physical manifestation of psychological tension itself, what are the roots of this tension? Bringing the mind into the moment, let’s observe ourselves in a state free of preconceived ideas or beliefs. Don’t guess at these questions. Observe yourself in relationship to others and the universe

When clients relinquish symptoms, succeed in achieving a personal goal, or make healthier choices for themselves, subsequently many will feel anxious, guilty, or depressed. That is, when clients make progress in treatment and get better, new therapists understandably are excited. But sometimes they will also be dismayed as they watch the client sabotage her success by gaining back unwanted weight or missing the next session after an important breakthrough and deep sharing with the therapist. Thus, loyalty and allegiance to symptoms—maladaptive behaviors originally developed to manage the “bad” or painfully frustrating aspects of parents—are not maladaptive to insecurely attached children. Such loyalty preserves “object ties,” or the connection to the “good” or loving aspects of the parent. Attachment fears of being left alone, helpless, or unwanted can be activated if clients disengage from the symptoms that represent these internalized “bad” objects (for example, if the client resolves an eating disorder or terminates a problematic relationship with a controlling/jealous partner). The goal of the interpersonal process approach is to help clients modify these early maladaptive schemas or internal working models by providing them with experiential or in vivo re-learning (that is, a “corrective emotional experience”). Through this real-life experience with the therapist, clients learn that, at least sometimes, some relationships can be different and do not have to follow the same familiar but problematic lines they have come to expect.

Although providing a corrective emotional experience may sound easy, it can be challenging to do—especially when all of this is so new to therapists-in-training. To help, Hill (2009) encourages therapists to be asking themselves the same process-oriented question throughout each session: Right now, am I co-creating a new and reparative relationship, or am I being drawn into a familiar but problematic interaction sequence that is reenacting for this client?

BPD sufferers experience emotions far more intensely than the rest of the population.  In many senses, this is no bad thing but the lack of control of these emotions is where BPD patients risk self-harm, destructive behaviors and problematic relationship issues with others.

Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farmworkers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision - eating like everyone else - is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.

To describe the ending of a narcissistic relationship as problematic would be a serious understatement.

we rarely convey our thoughts adequately to others and this makes our relationships with other people problematic.

Question (The Great Problematic): Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in (a) The freeing of the erotic spirit so that man- and womankind will make love and not war? or (b) The trivialization of the erotic by its demotion to yet another technique and need-satisfaction of the organism, toward the end that the demoniac spirit of the autonomous self, disappointed in all other sectors of life and in ordinary intercourse with others, is now disappointed even in the erotic, its last and best hope, and so erupts in violence--and in that very violence which is commensurate with the orgastic violence in the best days of the old erotic age--i.e., war?

Similarly, in attempting to understand the misogyny paradox, we might ask how it is that so many women are investing in straight relationships, when these relationships so often cause them damage? The queer theorist Lauren Berlant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their instability [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments, Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.

If you’d asked me when I started as a therapist what most people came in for, I would have replied that they hoped to feel less anxious or depressed, to have less problematic relationships. But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want. They rarely expressed it that way, but the more I learned about their lives, the more I could sense it, and I felt it in many ways myself.

The relationships between Anxious-Preoccupied and Avoidant partners are especially problematic, because their mutually-reinforcing insecurities can lead to a stable but unhappy partnership that does little to help them grow more secure but can go on for years.

Gustav Landauer best summarized this conceptual problematic in this way: “The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other behavior, by behaving differently” (Ward, 1973, p. 23). Understanding oppressive institutions as not “things” to be destroyed, but relationships to remake and ideas to replace is a double-edged sword. It is frustrating in that it disperses the sites of critical social contestation against oppressive institutions and ideas to, literally, the minds of every individual (though this does not preclude traditional externalized social struggles for greater equity and liberty). It is encouraging, though, in that it reveals their nonmonolithic and mutable nature.

And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn’t really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn’t really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre’s origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn’t post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there’s no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there’s nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there’s nothing wrong with SF getting called ‘dystopia’ when it’s marketed to teenage girls, because girls don’t read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so. It’s not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the works we think are problematic for fear of being ostracized. We need to get over this crushing obsession with niceness – that all fans must act nicely, that all authors must be nice to each other, that everyone must be nice about everything even when it goes against our principles – because it’s not helping us grow, or be taken seriously, or do anything other than throw a series of floral bedspreads over each new room-hogging elephant. We, all of us, need to get critical. Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA

In fact, the same intervention or response may even have the opposite effect on two different clients with contrasting developmental histories and cultural contexts. For example, if a client’s parent was distant or aloof, the therapist’s judicious self-disclosure may be helpful for the client. In contrast, the same type of self-disclosure is likely to be anxiety-arousing for a client who grew up serving as the confidant or emotional caregiver of a depressed parent. Greater sharing with the therapist may help the first client learn that, contrary to her deeply held beliefs, she does matter and can be of interest to other people. In contrast, for the second client, the same type of self-disclosure may inadvertently impose the unwanted needs of others and set this client back in treatment as, in her mind, she experiences herself back in her old caretaking role again—this time with the therapist. This unwanted reenactment occurs because the therapeutic relationship is now paralleling the same problematic relational theme that this client struggled with while growing up.

our most problematic dualism is not life fearing death but a fragile sense-of-self dreading its own groundlessness, according to Buddhism. By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra’s Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.

The price of a successful relationship is devotion. Devotion is, essentially, commitment to something we value. What are we devoted to? Surely not what another person wants. I think most people would agree that being devoted to that would be problematic even with the best of people. So, what exactly are we devoted to? We are devoted to the well-being of another person. And we are devoted to the well-being of the relationship. We honour the other person’s value and the relationship’s worth.


Freedom to Suspend Contact Ideally, you’d probably like to have the freedom to be yourself yet protect yourself while continuing to relate to your parent. Still, you might find it necessary at times to protect your emotional health by suspending contact for a while. Although this can stir up tremendous guilt and self-doubt, consider the possibility that you may have good reasons for keeping your distance. For example, your parent may be emotionally hurtful or disrespect your boundaries—an intrusive way of relating that impinges upon your right to your own identity. You may want to take a break from dealing with a parent who behaves in this way. Some parents are so unreflective that, despite repeated explanations, they simply don’t accept that their behavior is problematic. In addition, some sadistic parents truly are malevolent toward their children, and enjoy the pain and frustration they cause. Children of these sorts of parents may decide that suspending contact is the best solution. Just because a person is your biological parent doesn’t mean you have to keep an emotional or social tie to that person. Fortunately, you don’t need to have an active relationship with your parents to free yourself from their influence. If this weren’t so, people wouldn’t be able to emotionally separate from parents who live far away or have died. True freedom from unhealthy roles and relationships starts within each of us, not in our interactions and confrontations with others. Aisha’s

In accepting as two primary texts, Singer's Animal Liberation and Regan's The Case for Animal Rights--texts that valorize rationality--the animal defense movement reiterates a patriarchal disavowal of emotions as having a legitimate role in theory making. The problem is that while on the one hand it articulates positions against animal suffering, on the other hand animal rights theory dispenses with the idea that caring about and emotionally responding to this suffering can be appropriate sources of knowledge. Emotions and theory are related. One does not have to eviscerate theory of emotional content and reflection to present legitimate theory. Nor does the presence of emotional content and reflection eradicate or militate against thinking theoretically. By disavowing emotional responses, two major texts of animal defense close off the intellectual space for recognizing the role of emotions in knowledge and therefore theory making. As the issue of caring about suffering is problematized, difficulties with animal rights per se become apparent. Without a gender analysis, several important issues that accompany a focus on suffering are neglected, to the detriment of the movement. Animal rights theory offers a legitimating language for animal defense without acknowledging the indebtedness of the rights-holder to caring relationships. Nor does it provide models for theoretically engaging with our own emotional responses, since emotions are seen as untrustworthy. Because the animal advocacy movement has failed to incorporate an understanding of caring as a motivation for so many animal defense activists, and because it has not addressed the gendered nature of caring--that it is woman's duty to provide service to others, while it is men's choice--it has not addressed adequately the implications that a disproportionate number of activists are women motivated because they care about animal suffering. Animal rights theory that disowns or ignores emotions mirrors on the theoretical level the gendered emotional responses inherent in a patriarchal society. In this culture, women are supposed to do the emotional work for heterosexual intimate relationships: 'a man will come to expect that a woman's role in his life is to take care of his feelings and alleviate the discomfort involved in feeling.' At the cultural level, this may mean that women are doing the emotional work for the animal defense movement. And this emotional work takes place in the context of our own oppression.

People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t will suffer through constant misunderstandings and conflicts. Think about the people you are closest to: Are their values aligned with yours? Do you even know what their values or principles are? Too often in relationships, people’s principles aren’t clear. This is especially problematic in organizations where people need to have shared principles to be successful. Being crystal clear about my principles is why I labored so much over every sentence in this book.

A person's attachment status is a fundamental determinant of their relationships, and this is reflected in the way they feel about themselves and others. Neurotic patterns can be seen as originating here because, where core attachments are problematic, they will have a powerful influence on the way someone sees the world and their behaviour. Where there is a secure core state, a person feels good about themselves and their capacity to be effective and pursue their projects. Where the core state is insecure, defensive strategies come into play.

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

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.

The standard narrative of sexual desire is that it just appears-you're sitting at lunch or walking down the street, maybe you see a sexy person or think a sexy thought, and pow! you're saying to yourself, "I would like some sex!" This is how it works for maybe 75 percent of men and 15 percent of women...That's "spontaneous" desire. But some people find that they begin to want sex only after sexy things are happening. And that's normal. They don't have "low" desire, they don't suffer from any ailment, and they don't long to initiate but feel like they're not allowed to. Their bodies just need some more compelling reason than, "That's an attractive person right there," to want sex. They are sexually satisfied and in healthy relationships, which means that lack of spontaneous desire for sex is not, in itself, dysfunctional or problematic! Let me repeat: Responsive desire is normal and healthy.

Go on like this and you’ll never get used to yourself or anything else,’ his mother had warned him more than once. ‘You’ll always be reinventing the wheel.’ Then, as if aside to a third party: ‘And my God, won’t that be as tiring for you as it is for everyone who has to deal with you.’ In revenge for assessments of this kind, Shaw had quickly learned to skip-read his own experience, maintaining through adolescence only the most lateral relationship with its problems. A short attention span had helped: if for a month or two he liked motorcycles, by Christmas it was horses. He didn’t meet girls. He didn’t make friends. With university behind him, he’d found himself able to skirt most events and encounters, problematic or not, by cataloguing them under ‘sketchy and uninterpretable’ even as they occurred. When he actually took in the things that happened to him, the work was done somewhere else, somewhere deep, if he had anywhere like that: his surface focus – indeed his entire personality – always seemed to be taken up somewhere else.

Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides affect the soil food web, toxic to some members, warding off others, and changing the environment. Important fungal and bacterial relationships don’t form when a plant can get free nutrients. When chemically fed, plants bypass the microbial-assisted method of obtaining nutrients, and microbial populations adjust accordingly. Trouble is, you have to keep adding chemical fertilizers and using “-icides,” because the right mix and diversity—the very foundation of the soil food web—has been altered. It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms, for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic, pathogens and pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot more work than it needs to be.

One form of insecurity of attachment, called "disorganized/disoriented", has been associated with marked impairments in the emotional, social, and cognitive domains, and a predisposition toward a clinical condition known as dissociation in which the capacity to function in an organized, coherent manner is at times impaired. Studies have also found that youths with a history of disorganized attachments are at great risk of expressing hostility with their peers and have the potential for interpersonal violence as they mature (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobwitz, 1999; Carlson, 1998). This disorganized form of attachment has been proposed to be associated with the caregiver's frightened, frightening, or disoriented behavior with the child. Such experiences create a state of alarm in the child. The parents of these children often have an autobiographical narrative finding, as revealed in the Adult Attachment Interview, of unresolved trauma or grief that appears as a disorientation in their narrative account of their childhoods. Such linguistic disorientation occurs during the discussion of loss or threat from childhood experiences. Lack of resolution appears to be associated with parental behaviors that are incompatible with an organized adaptation on the part of the child. Lack of resolution of trauma or grief in a parent can lead to parental behaviors that create "paradoxical", unsolvable, and problematic situations for the child. The attachment figure is intended to be the source of protection, soothing, connections, and joy. Instead, the experience of the child who develops a disorganized attachment is such that the caregiver is actually the source of terror and fear, of "fright without solution", and so the child cannot turn to the attachment figure to be soothed (Main & Hesse, 1990). There is not organized adaptation and the child's response to this unsolvable problem is disorganization (see Hesse et al., this volume).

In Western culture today, you decide to get married because you feel an attraction to the other person. You think he or she is wonderful. But a year or two later—or, just as often, a month or two—three things usually happen. First, you begin to find out how selfish this wonderful person is. Second, you discover that the wonderful person has been going through a similar experience and he or she begins to tell you how selfish you are. And third, though you acknowledge it in part, you conclude that your spouse’s selfishness is more problematic than your own. This is especially true if you feel that you’ve had a hard life and have experienced a lot of hurt. You say silently, “OK, I shouldn’t do that—but you don’t understand me.” The woundedness makes us minimize our own selfishness. And that’s the point at which many married couples arrive after a relatively brief period of time. So what do you do then? There are at least two paths to take. First, you could decide that your woundedness is more fundamental than your self-centeredness and determine that unless your spouse sees the problems you have and takes care of you, it’s not going to work out. Of course, your spouse will probably not do this—especially if he or she is thinking almost the exact same thing about you! And so what follows is the development of emotional distance and, perhaps, a slowly negotiated kind of détente or ceasefire. There is an unspoken agreement not to talk about some things. There are some things your spouse does that you hate, but you stop talking about them as long as he or she stops bothering you about certain other things. No one changes for the other; there is only tit-for-tat bargaining. Couples who settle for this kind of relationship may look happily married after forty years, but when it’s time for the anniversary photo op, the kiss will be forced. The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s. Why? Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it. So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to “give yourself up.” You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it’s revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing. If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage. It Only Takes One to Begin

It is very possible that from a strong position she could have helped him see how he had some issues inside his organization that were not only creating problems for her, but were likely problematic for other relationships and within the company as well. She could have been a good partner, and helped him, as she solved her own problem with him. Usually when we confront a friend, for example, about an issue we are having with him or her, it helps that person in other relationships as well. As I said to the woman in the workshop, any time you are so dependent on a client that you cannot be honest with him, then you are no longer serving that client well. We need to be able to be honest with people in order to serve them, to help them. If we are afraid of the consequences of being honest, then we have lost our usefulness to them.

One of the most potent ways white supremacy is disseminated is through media representations, which have a profound impact on how we see the world. Those who write and direct films are our cultural narrators; the stories they tell shape our worldviews. Given that the majority of white people live in racial isolation from people of color (and black people in particular) and have very few authentic cross-racial relationships, white people are deeply influenced by the racial messages in films. Consider one statistic from the preceding list: of the hundred top-grossing films worldwide in 2016, ninety-five were directed by white Americans (ninety-nine of them by men). That is an incredibly homogenous group of directors. Because these men are most likely at the top of the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, and gender, they are the least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships. Yet they are in the position to represent the racial “other.” Their representations of the “other” are thereby extremely narrow and problematic, and yet they are reinforced over and over. Further, these biased representations have been disseminated worldwide; while white supremacy originated in the West, it circulates globally.

The Christian cliché “love the sinner, hate the sin” is problematic because it is always long on judgment and short on love. People sense that deeply; they understand when a relationship is fundamentally unsafe, precariously balanced on a scale of disapproval.

As more complex forms of knowledge emerge and an economic surplus is built up, experts devote themselves full-time to the subjects of their expertise, which, with the development of conceptual machineries, may become increasingly removed from the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Experts in these rarefied bodies of knowledge lay claim to a novel status. They are not only experts in this or that sector of the societal stock of knowledge, they claim ultimate jurisdiction over that stock of knowledge in its totality. They are, literally, universal experts. This does not mean that they claim to know everything, but rather that they claim to know the ultimate significance of what everybody knows and does. Other men may continue to stake out particular sectors of reality, but they claim expertise in the ultimate definitions of reality as such. This stage in the development of knowledge has a number of consequences. The first, which we have already discussed, is the emergence of pure theory. Because the universal experts operate on a level of considerable abstraction from the vicissitudes of everyday life, both others and they themselves may conclude that their theories have no relation whatever to the ongoing life of the society, but exist in a soft of Platonic heaven of ahistorical and asocial ideation. This is, of course, an illusion, but it can have great socio-historical potency, by virtue of the relationship between the reality-defining and reality-producing processes. A second consequence is a strengthening of traditionalism in the institutionalized actions thus legitimated, that is, a strengthening of the inherent tendency of institutionalization toward inertia.91 Habitualization and institutionalization in themselves limit the flexibility of human actions. Institutions tend to persist unless they become “problematic.” Ultimate legitimations inevitably strengthen this tendency. The more abstract the legitimations are, the less likely they are to be modified in accordance with changing pragmatic exigencies. If there is a tendency to go on as before anyway, the tendency is obviously strengthened by having excellent reasons for doing so. This means that institutions may persist even when, to an outside observer, they have lost their original functionality or practicality. One does certain things not because they work, but because they are right—right, that is, in terms of the ultimate definitions of reality promulgated by the universal experts.

One can easily see that Epictetus’ main concern was how to adopt an intellectual framework that will allow the individual to unshackle himself from the limits that our problematic relationships create. He was a firm believer of the fact that an individual can only be free if he frees himself from his limiting beliefs and also his addiction to the opinions of others. He was one of the first to see that there is a way for one to be in control insofar as one can control only the things that are within his control. Opinions, perceptions, views, beliefs, stories, are all manifestations of how our mind adapts to the stimuli of the environment. Sometimes they are true and sometimes they are untrue. One can’t control the extent to which truth is being spoken by others. But one can certainly control the extent to which he speaks the truth and how one reacts and perceives the truth or untruth spoken by others.

Language is a tricky thing, especially when we try to capture what's happening in our bodies and in our culture. Words like "health," "healthy," "sick," "illness," and "disability" are always relative and always loaded, rarely static, and often problematic. Words like "women," too. Our definitions are constantly in flux--as are, for instance, the laws that govern our rights. Whose bodies count?

The relationship between the careers of Ezra and Nehemiah is problematic. The biblical writers seem to suggest that Ezra arrived first in 458, followed by Nehemiah in 445/ 444, and that for a period they were active at the same time. But there are problems with such an understanding, and a possible solution is that Ezra arrived in 398 and needed to repeat or reinforce some of Nehemiah’s earlier reforms.

No matter what therapeutic approach is provided, if the relationship between therapist and client is not established or is perceived by the client as problematic, then it is unlikely that the therapy will be successful.

Indoctrination was the primary method advocated, usually in the form of classes or patriotic songs, although many far-fetched ideas were also proposed. One such idea was to restrict soldiers’ access to women because heterosexual relationships made male soldiers too “civilized for soldiery.” Conversely, homosexual relationships between male soldiers were not considered problematic.

She taught me the four key skills in DBT. First is mindfulness. It’s the ability to radically accept things as they are and be present in the moment. The second is distress tolerance, which is the ability to tolerate negative emotions instead of trying to escape from them. The third is emotional regulation, which teaches you the ability to manage and change intense and problematic emotions. The fourth is interpersonal effectiveness, which teaches you to communicate with others in a way that is assertive, maintains self-respect, and strengthens relationships.

Our relationship with books can change over time. Sometimes, as we grow older, we see the value of a novel we'd previously dismissed; sometimes we find out something about a writer that casts an uneasy shadow over their work. And sometimes, a book shows itself to be more complex and problematic than we first realized. This can make us revise our opinions completely.

Dismissing problematic behaviors as addiction is a denial of responsibility and a declaration of a lack of self-control. And that right there is some fucking bullshit. Anyone who is engaging in problematic behavior around sex is absolutely accountable for their behavior and absolutely able to recognize their urges and consider how acting on them will impact their partners and their lives in general in the long term.

the most common issue for which couples seek sex therapy: low desire. Low desire is, by definition, a relationship issue. The partner with “low” desire is the one who wants sex too infrequently for the other partner’s satisfaction. It’s not that one person’s desire for sex is somehow inherently “too low” or the other’s is “too high.” They’re just different—at least in the current context. But it’s not the differential itself that causes the issue; it’s how the couple manages it. Problematic dynamics emerge when partners have different levels of desire and they believe that one person’s level of desire is “better” than the other person’s. For example, let’s say Partner A has more spontaneous desire and Partner B is more responsive. In this scenario, Partner A may feel rejected and undesirable because they almost always do the initiating, and then Partner B may start to feel pushed and judged and so will resist more. Partner A asks and asks and asks and feels rejected and hurt and resentful because Partner B keeps saying no, no, no; and Partner B feels defensive but also guilty and hurt because just being asked makes Partner B feel like there must be something wrong with them. Meanwhile Partner A may even start to wonder, “Am I broken? Do I want sex too much? Am I sexually obsessed or compulsive?” It’s a mess. I call it “the chasing dynamic.” And

Just as Audre Lorde warned against using patriarchal rhetoric, patriarchal structures of organization, and patriarchal privileging of solidarity over difference to dismantle patriarchy,40 I too am reluctant to wholeheartedly claim for the feminist cause a rhetorical mode so thoroughly steeped in male domination. On the other hand, if the goal is to dismantle patriarchal structures, and if feminist trolling helps accomplish those ends, then are the means, however problematic, retroactively justified? I look forward to further research that tackles these questions, including the question of how best to theorize the relationship between trolling and global activism. For now, I remain simultaneously intrigued by and wary of the political potential of trolling—a fitting end to a project and behavioral practice steeped in ambivalence.

relationships are nonlinear (parabolic or otherwise heavily curved), it is not appropriate to use linear regression. Then, one or both variables must be transformed, as discussed in Chapter 12. Second, simple regression assumes that the linear relationship is constant over the range of observations. This assumption is violated when the relationship is “broken,” for example, by having an upward slope for the first half of independent variable values and a downward slope over the remaining values. Then, analysts should consider using two regression models each for these different, linear relationships. The linearity assumption is also violated when no relationship is present in part of the independent variable values. This is particularly problematic because regression analysis will calculate a regression slope based on all observations. In this case, analysts may be misled into believing that the linear pattern holds for all observations. Hence, regression results always should be verified through visual inspection. Third, simple regression assumes that the variables are continuous. In Chapter 15, we will see that regression can also be used for nominal and dichotomous independent variables. The dependent variable, however, must be continuous. When the dependent variable is dichotomous, logistic regression should be used (Chapter 16). Figure 14.2 Three Examples of r The following notations are commonly used in regression analysis. The predicted value of y (defined, based on the regression model, as y = a + bx) is typically different from the observed value of y. The predicted value of the dependent variable y is sometimes indicated as ŷ (pronounced “y-hat”). Only when R2 = 1 are the observed and predicted values identical for each observation. The difference between y and ŷ is called the regression error or error term

while trolling behaviors are regarded as inherently problematic, the cultural tropes with which trolls’ behaviors are aligned are either celebrated or, more frequently, rendered invisible, as if expansionism were as natural as the air Americans breathe.

Here the individual experience of thinking, 'how it feels', is presented as the ultimate evidence for the nature of thought. But as I hope Chapter 2 will make clear, language is not an imitation of thought, but its condition. It is only within language that the production of meaning is possible, however much our individual experience of producing meaning is one of stumbling and panic, and of looking for adequate formulations of what seems intuitive. Of course it is true that the written text does not necessarily reproduce the empirical process of thinking, but our analysis of the nature of thought need not confine itself to the question of how it feels to think. Frye's final appeal to experience, in conjunction with his account of a thought process culminating in 'a completely incommunicable intuition' places him within the same empiricist-idealist problematic as the New Critics. And for all its claims to science and systematicity, his own theory, like theirs, is fundamentally non-explanatory. Meaning for Frye inheres timelessly in 'verbal structures', intuitively available to readers in quite different ages and places because they recognize in them the echo of their own wishes and anxieties. But the only evidence for this concept of an essentially unchanging human nature is precisely the body of literary texts which the concept apparently offers to explain. The relationship between desire and language and between language and meaning is not discussed. At the same time, Frye's theory

The constant pursuit of material possessions/money status or sexual relationships, and so on, can be problematic.

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.

Increasing tolerance for our differences does not mean passive acceptance of a problematic or passionless relationship. Instead, this healthy adaptation is based on real insight that helps us to understand our partners better and respond in ways that are more loving and will inspire the best in them.

The third organizing theme focuses on the relationship between the creator and work in a domain. Early in life, the creator generally discovers an area or object of interest that is consuming. At first the creator seeks to master work in that domain in the manner of others working within the culture; increasingly, however, the very relationship to the domain becomes problematic. The individual then, willingly or unwillingly, feels constrained to try inventing a new symbol system-a system of meaning-that is adequate to the chosen problems or themes and that can eventually make sense to others as well. In each chapter I examine in detail the ways in which a creator forges a new system of meaning in a distinctive domain; it turns out that surprising commonalities hold across the domains as well.

Ways Your HSP Trait Affects Your Medical Care:  You’re more sensitive to bodily signs and symptoms.  If you don’t lead a life suited to your trait, you’ll develop more stress-related and/or “psychosomatic illnesses.”  You’re more sensitive to medications.  You’re more sensitive to pain.  You’ll be more aroused, usually over-aroused, by medical environments, procedures, examinations, and treatments.  In “health care” environments your deep intuition cannot ignore the shadowy presence of suffering and death, the human condition.  Given all the above, and the fact that most mainstream medical professionals are not HSPs, your relationships with them are usually more problematic. — Elaine Aron, PhD, The Highly Sensitive Person

Focusing on problems of the past, or the present, will prevent you from moving to the solutions in your future. Focusing on the problems of the past, or the present, will guarantee a problematic future.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.

[on envy] ... from the most obvious signifiers our respective envy haas attached to—haircuts, eyes, a kind of buoyant puppy-dog masculinity—and understand the envy, instead, as grounded in a desire to have that kind of uncomplicated, carefree, rather thoughtless relationship to masculinity (in other words, to be able to be a boy in a kind of simple, unreflexive way; to be a vapid boy; to be a limbo). To have not had to spend years processing whether or not one was a man, or how one could become a man; to have not had to do the hard work of parsing what one's investment in and lure toward masculinity was and whether or not it was problematic (i.e., a product of internalized misogyny, a desire for structurally off-limits forms of patriarchal power).

Often called ‘seers’, individuals with actively open third eye chakras have access to a list of skills that help make navigating life, relationships, and emotions far less problematic and taxing. An opened third eye may also improve our perception of the spiritual realm that exists within our world - a skill that many individuals who have mourned the loss of a loved one seek from the practice of third eye opening.

Pelosi’s wariness seemed confirmed on March 22, 2019, when Mueller flubbed the unveiling of his team’s report on Trump’s ties to foreign governments. Although the report was devastating, Mueller’s initial silence allowed Attorney General William Barr to issue misleading characterizations that overshadowed the report’s details. Barr claimed that the report “exonerated” the president. The actual report documented a number of extremely problematic relationships between the president’s campaign and Russian officials. Mueller, who did not believe he had the authority to call for impeachment since the independent counsel law had expired, then made things worse by faltering in congressional testimony.

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.

Text, emails, and other forms of electronic media are the most popular forms of communication now. However, they also tend to be the most problematic right now. You might be surprised at how entire relationships can be ruined just because of one poorly worded tweet or status update. Even entire careers and reputations went down in flames because of the things those people said online. What you have to remember is that text has two disadvantages. First, it cannot carry the subtler elements of communications like nuance, context, and even sarcasm. Second, it has an element of perpetuity to it, so anything poorly-worded you say now will come back to haunt you in a few weeks or years. The strategy here, then, is to think before you click. Make sure that your choice of words have been thoroughly thought out and your overall message leaves no room for interpretation, especially negative ones.

Whether Homer was a feminist, a male chauvinist or a woman himself (herself?), he (she?) has all the qualities found in recent male poets, who are notoriously antigovernment, antiwar, antiauthority and fond of women, children, nature and sexuality. Obviously, he was in Freudian terms an oral personality. In any case, his values (and those of later poets like Euripides, Sophocles, the anonymous authors of the Greek Anthology, etc.) were always compatible with sexual love, however much the relationship between men and women had been rendered problematical by the patriarchal system, which had reduced women to second-class citizens.

The price of a successful relationship is devotion. Devotion is, essentially, commitment to something we value. What are we devoted to? Surely not what another person wants. I think most people would agree that being devoted to that would be problematic even with the best of people. So, what exactly are we devoted to? We are devoted to the well-being of another person. And we are devoted to the wellbeing of the relationship. We honour the value of the other person and we honour the worth of the relationship.

In the 1980s, a psychologist named James Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model of behavior change (TTM) based on research showing that people generally don’t “just do it,” as Nike (or a new year’s resolution) might have it, but instead tend to move through a series of sequential stages that look like this: Stage 1: Pre-contemplation Stage 2: Contemplation Stage 3: Preparation Stage 4: Action Stage 5: Maintenance So let’s say you want to make a change—exercise more, end a relationship, or even try therapy for the first time. Before you get to that point, you’re in the first stage, pre-contemplation, which is to say, you’re not even thinking about changing. Some therapists might liken this to denial, meaning that you don’t realize you might have a problem. When Charlotte first came to me, she presented herself as a social drinker; I realized that she was in the pre-contemplation stage as she talked about her mother’s tendency to self-medicate with alcohol but failed to see any connection to her own alcohol use. When I challenged her on this, she shut down, got irritated (“People my age go out and drink!”), or engaged in “what-aboutery,” the practice of diverting attention from the difficulty under discussion by raising a different problematic issue. (“Never mind X, what about Y?”)

Internal research done in 2019 found that a little over 3 percent of American users were suffering from “serious problems with sleep, work, or relationships that they attribute to Facebook” and felt anxiety about their relationship with the product. The research suggested that roughly 10 million Americans suffered from “problematic use” of the main Facebook platform alone. “Though Facebook use may not meet clinical standards for addiction, we want to fix the underlying design issues that lead to this concern,” the researchers wrote.

Horney put forth the idea of basic anxiety, which refers to a child’s perception of being helpless and alone in a scary and dangerous world. When a child’s relationship with his or her parents is problematic, this anxiety spikes. Horney theorized that parental inconsistency, lack of warmth, or failure to consider a child’s emotional experience threaten the parent-child bond, and that the child then tries to minimize the resulting anxiety by developing defense mechanisms. Eventually, this pattern can make its way into the child’s personality and lead to the development of more permanent traits. This

[...] the relationship between the couple does have a logical structure. It begins at the beginning: with the initial excitement, the initial attraction. When an attempt is made to realize the desire, it encounters a problematic reality. This love still needs to mature; it needs to undergo a process until it is realized. The first attempt by the woman to establish a rendezvous is actually the first dialogue between the man and the woman, and therefore this courtship does not succeed. The relationship between the man and the woman will have to begin with a real dialogue between them [...].

In some ways, this paradox bears resemblance to the one examined by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochschild traveled to rural Louisiana—where waterways are among the most polluted in the nation—to ask how it is that poor southern whites whose land, water, and bodies have been devastated by industrial toxicity continue to vote for probusiness conservatives committed to deregulation and, hence, environmental destruction.74 In other words, why do poor southern whites undermine their own best interests? Hochschild finds the answer in a complex mix of rural whites’ gratitude for their industrial jobs, their Christian belief that God will ultimately restore any human damage done to the Earth and to their own bodies, and their belief that the government cannot be trusted to help them. Similarly, in attempting to understand the misogyny paradox, we might ask how it is that so many women are investing in straight relationships, when these relationships so often cause them damage? The queer theorist Lauren Berlant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their instability [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments, Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.”75

If dieting programs had to stand up to the same scrutiny as medications, they would never be allowed for public consumption. Imagine, for example, taking an asthma medication that improves your breathing for a few weeks, but in the long run causes rebound asthma attacks and ultimately damages your lungs. Would you blame yourself for the medication not working, yet still continue to take it? Of course not! That’s what the process of dieting is like, even if your healthcare professional prescribes it. Would you really embark on a diet (even a so-called sensible diet) if you knew that it would ultimately fail? The pursuit of weight is so problematic. It perpetuates weight cycling and harms your relationship with food, mind, and body.

I define that the tech industry switches in all directions contrary to what people believe as the norm for the new Metaverse. Why spend trillions of dollars on big data when it is becoming more useless? We need dynamic content to create a boom in the tech industry for the next millennium. Why hire someone with a 4 year college degree for a career in database administration when companies can't afford to pay 100k a year? We can manage information stores perfectly fine with google sheets or microsoft excel. I thought that utilizing AI would completely switch off problematics in relationship to Data As A Service when programs are dynamically building hash tables for objects in random access memory, storing them as blockchains Inna virtualized file container ;)." - Jonathan Roy Mckinney

The expectation that people of color should teach white people about racism is another aspect of white racial innocence that reinforces several problematic racial assumptions. First, it implies that racism is something that happens to people of color and has nothing to do with us and that we consequently cannot be expecte3d to have any knowledge of it. This framework denies that racism is a relationship in which both groups are involved. By leaving it to people of color to tackle racial issues, we offload the tensions and social dangers of speaking openly onto them. We can ignore the risks ourselves and remain silent on questions of our own culpability. Second, this request requires nothing of us and reinforces unequal power relations by asking people of color to do our work. There are copious resources available on the subject generate3d by people of color who are willing to share the information; why haven't we sought it out before this conversation? Third, the request ignores the historical dimensions of race relations. It disregards how often people of color indeed tried to tell us what racism is like for them and how often they have been dismissed. To ask people of color to tell us how they experience racism without first building a trusting relationship and being willing to meet them halfway by also being vulnerable shows that we are not racially aware and that this exchange will probably be invalidating for them.

Many adults who have ADHD don’t know they have it. They have been simply surviving, thinking that what they are experiencing is normal or not problematic enough to address. They may have been silently struggling with school, work, and relationships for a majority of their lives.

Our argument is that it is not contact with the police per se that is problematic. In fact, the results of the study suggest that when the police deal with people in ways that they experience as being fair, contact promotes trust and a variety of types of desirable public behavior. Rather, it is contact that communicates suspicion and mistrust that undermines the relationship between the public and the police.

Consider one statistic from the preceding list: of the hundred top-grossing films worldwide in 2016, ninety-five were directed by white Americans (ninety-nine of them by men). That is an incredibly homogenous group of directors. Because these men are most likely at the top of the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, and gender, they are the least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships. Yet they are in the position to represent the racial “other.” Their representations of the “other” are thereby extremely narrow and problematic, and yet they are reinforced over and over. Further, these biased representations have been disseminated worldwide; while white supremacy originated in the West, it circulates globally.

Eliminating the symptoms that accompany emotional distress might provide short-term solutions, allowing, for instance, an impulsive child to sit at a desk or a depressed adult to get out of bed in the morning. But if these problematic behaviors serve an adaptive function, are actually a way of coping or holding oneself together, then if the relational and developmental context of these behaviors is not addressed, we should not be surprised if they reappear in different and sometimes more problematic forms.

People may carry these meanings of hopelessness forward into other relationships in their lives, with fear preventing them from being open to the kinds of relationships that allow for growth and change. When meanings have gone awry, we need to do more than just label and eliminate problematic behaviors and emotions. Acknowledging their developmental and relational origins leads us to a new model of healing.

One of the most potent ways white supremacy is disseminated is through media representations, which have a profound impact on how we see the world. Those who write and direct films are our cultural narrators; the stories they tell shape our worldviews. Given that the majority of white people live in racial isolation from people of color (and black people in particular) and have very few authentic cross-racial relationships, white people are deeply influenced by the racial messages in films. Consider one statistic from the preceding list: of the hundred top-grossing films worldwide in 2016, ninety-five were directed by white Americans (ninety-nine of them by men). That is an incredibly homogenous group of directors. Because these men are most likely at the top of the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, and gender, they are the least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships. Yet they are in the position to represent the racial “other.” Their representations of the “other” are thereby extremely narrow and problematic, and yet they are reinforced over and over. Further, these biased representations have been disseminated worldwide; while white supremacy originated in the West, it circulates globally. White resistance to the term white supremacy prevents us from examining how these messages shape us.

open by asking Angela, “Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in that meeting?” When she agrees, I continue. “I realize that my comment about Deborah’s hair was inappropriate.” Angela nods and explains that she did not know me and did not want to be joking about black women’s hair (a sensitive issue for many black women) with a white woman whom she did not have a trusting relationship with, much less in a professional work meeting. I apologize and ask her if I have missed anything else problematic in the meeting. “Yes,” she replies. “That survey? I wrote that survey. And I have spent my life justifying my intelligence to white people.” My chest constricts as I immediately realize the impact of my glib dismissal of the survey. I acknowledge this impact and apologize. She accepts my apology. I ask Angela if there is anything else that needs to be said or heard so that we may move forward. She replies that yes, there is. “The next time you do something like this, would you like feedback publicly or privately?” she asks. I answer that given my role as an educator, I would appreciate receiving the feedback publicly as it is important for white people to see that I am also engaged in a lifelong process of learning and growth. And I could model for other white people how to receive feedback openly and without defensiveness.

[S]exual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation of from nature, especially when the reals of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.

Clearly, the “midlife crisis” genre draped a veil of narcissism over the entire enterprise of individual development. In the era of Levinson’s Jim Tracy, an individual problem, “I’m unhappy with my wife,” gave rise to an individualistic solution, “I need a divorce.” But the resulting critiques leveled against “individualistic marriage,” “consumer marriage,” and “expressive divorce” were also problematic; in their effort to protect children from their parents’ misguided seeking, they shortchanged people’s authentic emotional longings. The “heroic” midlife crisis genre wrongly characterized the connection of individuality and intimacy, by suggesting that we develop ourselves by casting off relationships we’ve done little to change. But if we’ve learned anything from the profusion of research on marriage and emotions, it’s that emotions are not best managed by simple suppression. Staying married by stifling individual needs isn’t a solution either. Happily,

In contrast to the silent, accommodating woman, a man who feels powerless to use his voice violates our very definition of what it means to be a man. Consequently, he may then seek to prove his manhood in the most problematic ways: by being tough and aggressive, by acting up and acting out, or by removing himself emotionally from his relationships. He may be in a relationship where no one is going to tell him what to do, meaning he won’t allow himself to be influenced or even moved by his partner. These are common male responses to feeling utterly helpless to right things through conversation or to speak with clarity, strength, and resolve.

Lack of empathy is what makes narcissists problematic partners, parents, friends, coworkers—just about any relationship you can think of. Empathy is an inside job, and narcissists have underdeveloped psychological endoskeletons.

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.

The expectation that people of color should teach white people about racism is another aspect of white racial innocence that reinforces several problematic racial assumptions. First, it implies that racism is something that happens to people of color and has nothing to do with us and that we consequently cannot be expected to have any knowledge of it. This framework denies that racism is a relationship in which both groups are involved. By leaving it to people of color to tackle racial issues, we offload the tensions and social dangers of speaking openly onto them. We can ignore the risks ourselves and remain silent on questions of our own culpability.

Cruelly exploiting and slaughtering human beings is widely recognized as spiritually problematic, but the veal industry is not, battery cages are not, foie gras and the use of farrowing crates are not, debeaking and slaughter lines are not. How can this be? Anymal suffering is extreme on factory farms, massive numbers of premature deaths are the expected end, and both are sanctioned not only by the government but also by the masses—including those who affiliate with a particular religious tradition and take their religious commitments seriously. The reason for this cruelty and indifference is obvious: With human beings creating the rules, anymals are the last to be noticed and the most likely to be discarded or exploited. Consequently, wherever humanity suffers, anymals suffer yet more.

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.

Some people have a seemingly quiet life but they are noisy inside. Some people have a seemingly busy life but they have a quietness within. To lessen the inner noise we can develop self-awareness, introspection, and stillness. We grow in solitude. We need quiet times. They make our life happier and less problematic. They move us closer to glowing health, agelessness, peace, prosperity, clear thinking, inspired ideas, harmonious and interesting relationships, and effective problem solving. They secure our personal and spiritual progress. As we become more conscious through the practice of quiet times, we progressively lose the problems of illness, stress, confusion, and relationship breakdowns. By having quiet times, we start to wake up.

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.

Relationships are pretty simple: what you see is what you get. What you see in your dating relationship likely is the best that person has to offer. It’s problematic when we live for what we hope for in a relationship rather than for what the relationship actually is. If you can’t see it, hear it, or feel it, then it probably isn’t there. Get

Heidegger, in "Being and Time", while challenging the logical principle of identity, seeks to bring the concept of Being closer to that of Time, even though they are ontologically distinct elements. This approximation results in a potential conflation of the identity of Being with the necessary condition for its manifestation. Temporality, as the underlying condition for the existence and manifestation of all entities, cannot be considered a defining attribute of Being itself. Thus, it is not appropriate to qualify it as essential to Being. Furthermore, the thesis that Time manifests only because of Being seems to reflect a problematic subjectivism, as it reduces the autonomy of Time to the existential scope of *Dasein*. Although Being and Time are related, it is necessary to acknowledge that they remain distinct in their essence. Nevertheless, in the case of Being, Heidegger argues that without Time, there is no horizon within which it can manifest, indicating a structural dependency between the two. This relationship, though significant, does not imply ontological equivalence.

Heidegger, in "Being and Time", while challenging the logical principle of identity, seeks to bring the concept of Being closer to that of Time, even though they are ontologically distinct elements. This approximation results in a potential conflation of the identity of Being with the necessary condition for its manifestation. Temporality, as the underlying condition for the existence and manifestation of all entities, cannot be considered a defining attribute of Being itself. Thus, it is not appropriate to qualify it as essential to Being. Furthermore, the thesis that Time manifests only because of Being seems to reflect a problematic subjectivism, as it reduces the autonomy of Time to the existential scope of “Dasein”. Although Being and Time are related, it is necessary to acknowledge that they remain distinct in their essence. Nevertheless, in the case of Being, Heidegger argues that without Time, there is no horizon within which it can manifest, indicating a structural dependency between the two. This relationship, though significant, does not imply ontological equivalence.

Focusing on the problems of the past, or the present, will guarantee a problematic future.

The Rubber Band Theory,” the basic claim is that men fill up on intimacy, then need to withdraw and spend time away before they bounce back for an intimacy refill. First, the theory that men uniquely need solitude is incorrect. All humans seek connection at times and independence at other times. Connection isn’t a uniquely female impulse. Isolation isn’t a uniquely male impulse. What drives those tendencies has a lot more to do with factors such as personality and previous life experiences. The notion that men need their space normalizes and excuses a behavior that is potentially problematic for harmonious relationships. Research on couples communication shows that isolating oneself and refusing to discuss issues, otherwise known as stonewalling, is one of the worst possible things to do. That is, unless you’re trying to end the relationship.