Reciprocal Relationship Quotes

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It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
John Joseph Powell (The Secret of Staying in Love)
Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
Women want their love to be reciprocated in the same way they give it; they want their romantic lives to be as rewarding as they make them for their potential mates; they want the emotions that they turn on full blast to be met with the same intensity; and they expect the premium they put on commitment to be equally adhered to, valued, and respected.
Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment)
In the true married relationship, the independence of husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.
Lucretia Mott
Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
No relationship is absolutely reciprocal. Sometimes, when couples try to split everything in half, they discover that the relationship is not a partnership but a bean counting exercise. Striving for reciprocity in a relationship can be unhealthy.
Sylvain Reynard (Gabriel's Rapture (Gabriel's Inferno, #2))
to feed, help, protect, comfort, console, support, nurse, or heal to be fed, helped, nursed, protected, comforted, consoled, supported, nursed, or healed to form mutually enjoyable, enduring, cooperating and reciprocating relationship with Other, with an equal to be forgiven to be loved to be free
Sarah Kane
Without close and reciprocal relationships with other animal beings, we're alienated from the rich, diverse, and magnificent world in which we live.
Marc Bekoff (The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy - and Why They Matter)
Being loved back by the person he loved to the point where he couldn't cope anymore with the vulnerable reciprocity of giving and receiving, he ended the relationship to get it over with before he lost it
Anna Burns (Milkman)
The belief that the people around us will reciprocate in proportion to what we give them is called "trust.
Emily Nagoski (Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle)
If you are nice, but you give of yourself with strings attached, the demand for reciprocity will send him several steps backward.
Sherry Argov (Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl―A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship)
Does this person value your time? Time is another important boundary and a real eye-opener when it comes to how people value their relationship with you. If they always show up late, cancel last minute, and only drop in your life when they need you, they do not respect your time. This is not a reciprocal relationship. You are being used for your energy! Don’t give any time to people who don’t have time for you.
Florence Given (Women Don't Owe You Pretty)
I believed my love would be reciprocated because it was pure. But it wasn’t. Reaction to every action? It doesn’t work that way with a human heart. Human mind resembles the quantum world. Always uncertain. Beyond any explanation.
Abhaidev (That Thing About You)
No relationship is absolutely reciprocal. Sometimes, when couples try to split everything in half, they discover that the relationship is not a partnership but a bean counting exercise. Striving for reciprocity in a relationship can be unhealthy. On the other hand, striving to have a partnership in which each partner is valued equally and shares both burdens and responsibilities can be healthy.
Sylvain Reynard (Gabriel's Rapture (Gabriel's Inferno, #2))
You are not always right. It’s not always about being right. The best thing you can offer others is understanding. Being an active listener is about more than just listening, it is about reciprocating and being receptive to somebody else. Everybody has woes. Nobody is safe from pain. However, we all suffer in different ways. So learn to adapt to each person, know your audience and reserve yourself for people who have earned the depths of you
Mohadesa Najumi
Life works most perfectly when a reciprocal love relationship is in place between man and God.
Beth Moore (A Woman and Her God (Extraordinary Women))
What is emotional intimacy? It is that depp sense of being connected to one another. It is feeling loved, respected and appreciated, while at the same time seeking to reciprocate. To feel loved is to have the sense that the other person genuinely cares about your well-being. Respect has to do with feeling that your potential spouse has positive regard for your personhood, intellect, abilities and personality. Appreciation is that inner sense that your partner values your contribution to the relationship.
Gary Chapman
There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be.
Alain de Botton (Essays In Love)
When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself. Something essential happens in a vegetable garden. It’s a place where if you can’t say “I love you” out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.
Carroll Quigley
In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
Old-growth cultures, like old-growth forests, have not been exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or history, but of relationships born out of reciprocity between land and people.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
The customers should be happy, but the business should not accept mediocre profits just to make the customers happy. The relationship between business and customer should be reciprocal. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
The thankful heart is always close to the creative forces of the universe, causing countless blessings to flow toward it by the law of reciprocal relationship, based on a cosmic law of action and reaction.
Joseph Murphy (The Power of your Subconscious Mind)
Anger spoils relationships where there should be great reciprocity.
Robert A.F. Thurman (Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a Whole Lot Happier)
There is a reciprocal relationship between truth about the past and justice in the present. When we achieve justice in the present, remedying some past event or practice, then we can face it and talk about it more openly, precisely because we have made it right. It has become a success story.
James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
Love is not all you need to be with someone. You can love anyone, but that doesn’t mean you should be in a relationship with them. Compatibility, respect, trust, reciprocity, vulnerability, intimacy, communication, understanding and honesty are needed. Effort is a must.
Vex King (Things No One Taught Us About Love: How to Build Healthy Relationships with Yourself and Others)
True joy comes when you inspire, encourage, and guide someone else on a path that benefits him or her. —ZIG ZIGLAR There are a lot of jealous people out there. Sometimes your happy news creates tension in a relationship. Be sure to be supportive and happy with their news and, hopefully, it will be reciprocated. Goal: The next time a friend or family member shares good news with you, make sure your joy is sincere.
Demi Lovato (Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year)
If we are co-eternal with God, then it is not God's creation of the human out of nothing that defines our essential relationship to him. It is His freely made choice to inaugurate and sustain loving relationships, and our choice to reciprocate, that are at the core of our relationship to the Divine.
Terryl L. Givens (The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life)
...for love loves power. That is why we can suicidally fall in love with others but can rarely reciprocate the love of those suicidally in love with us.
Elif Shafak (The Bastard of Istanbul)
Love never lives on a one-way street, for it will always come back up the road bigger than how we had sent it down the road.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The cycle of reciprocity, rupture, and repair is the nature of healthy relationships
Deb Dana (Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory)
Make time for those who make time for you. Treasure those who care enough to invest their time and energy. Friendship is for giving.
Akiroq Brost
o relație bună, am mai spus-o, este reciprocă: amândoi, în egală măsură, investim energie, grijă, preocupare pentru relație
Domnica Petrovai (Iubește și fii iubit(ă): (aproape) totul despre relația de cuplu)
To be a barbarian today is to draw your own perimeter and build social networks and reciprocal relationships that are not dictated or controlled by the Empire.
Jack Donovan (Becoming a Barbarian)
It would be a reciprocal relationship—the woman giving the food and shelter and doing some typing for him and the man giving the priceless gift of himself,’ said Mark, swaying a little and bumping into a tree. ‘It is commoner in our society than many people would suppose.
Barbara Pym (Less Than Angels)
We will martyr ourselves, suffering under the weight of a non-reciprocal relationship until some part of us bursts in protest. Suddenly, we lose our mind, and allowing ourselves to heap all manner of nastiness, name calling, patronizing, death threats on the “deserving” jerk who has it coming after all we do for him/her! As the final insult rings across the room and we regain consciousness, we are horrified by what has come out of our mouth. After all, we LOVE these people, and we quickly move into anxious terror that this time we have gone too far . . . this time we crossed the line and they will leave us. So, we hunker back down and the martyrdom begins again. It’s a terrible cycle.
Mary Crocker Cook (Awakening Hope. A Developmental, Behavioral, Biological Approach to Codependency Treatment.)
What is needed most in architecture today is the very thing that is most needed in life- Integrity. Just as it is in a human being, so integrity is the deepest quality in a building...if we succeed, we will have done a great service to our moral nature- the psyche- of our democratic society...Stand up for integrity in your building and you stand for integrity not only in the life of those who did the building but socially a reciprocal relationship is inevitable.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Finding fault with yourself is also the key to overcoming the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that damage so many valuable relationships. The instant you see some contribution you made to a conflict, your anger softens—maybe just a bit, but enough that you might be able to acknowledge some merit on the other side. You can still believe you are right and the other person is wrong, but if you can move to believing that you are mostly right, and your opponent is mostly wrong, you have the basis for an effective and nonhumiliating apology. You can take a small piece of the disagreement and say, “I should not have done X, and I can see why you felt Y.” Then, by the power of reciprocity, the other person will likely feel a strong urge to say, “Yes, I was really upset by X. But I guess I shouldn’t have done P, so I can see why you felt Q.” Reciprocity amplified by self-serving biases drove you apart back when you were matching insults or hostile gestures, but you can turn the process around and use reciprocity to end a conflict and save a relationship.
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
Why couldn't relationships be reciprocal, both people steadily accruing interest at the same rate?
Emma Cline (The Girls)
Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
Love reciprocated out of pure genuine intent is true love.
Wayne Chirisa
A reaper emerges from the crowd with glossy, black wings, and Akila takes off her headset and runs dizzily over. She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.
Raven Leilani (Luster)
I tend to imagine the self-regulating system like little gremlins hoping on the pain side of the balance to counteract the weight on the pleasure side. The gremlins represent the work of homeostasis, the tendency of any living system to maintain physiologic equilibrium. Once the balance is level, it keeps going, tipping an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. In the 1970s social scientists Richard Solomon and John Corbett called this reciprocal relationship between pleasure and pain "The Opponent Process Theory". Any prolonged or repeated departure from hedonic or adaptive neutrality has a cost. That cost is an after-reaction, that is opposite in value to the stimulus, or as the old saying goes: "What goes up, must come down".
Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence)
Locating friendship at the heart of mission involves certain assumptions -- that reconciliation with God is something for which every human being is made and relationships are reciprocal.
Christopher L. Heuertz (Friendship at the Margins: Discovering Mutuality in Service and Mission (Resources for Reconciliation))
The darker dynamics of narcissism imply that one person in the relationship gives just about everything, and the other (the narcissist) just takes. If the relationship is reciprocal, compromise is effortless. The more challenging disappointments are the lack of empathy, the lack of connection, the lack of support.
Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
When I thought about how much time I had already put into a relationship without reciprocation from the other person and how I spent YEARS recovering and trying to recover from the damage of her verbal, emotional and physical abuse and neglect, I realized that I was the only one trying and I wasn’t the problem! That understanding changed everything!
Darlene Ouimet
people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t.
Ethan Kross (Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It)
There is nothing greater in this world then love. Many things in this world have limits and expiration dates, but love is constant and everywhere. More important, it can take many forms and even when we lose those we care about, their love continues as long as we are open to receiving and reciprocating that love. Don't let the physical world dictate who you are and how to act, open your mind to something greater and as a result you will always find peace within your heart.
Jonathan Kuiper (Our Place by the Sea)
Let me be clear here: I object—strenuously—to the sexualization of girls but not necessarily to girls having sex. I expect and want my daughter to have a healthy, joyous erotic life before marriage. Long, long, long before marriage. I do, however, want her to understand why she’s doing it: not for someone else’s enjoyment, not to keep a boyfriend from leaving, not because everyone else is. I want her to do it for herself. I want her to explore and understand her body’s responses, her own pleasure, her own desire. I want her to be able to express her needs in relationship, to say no when she needs to, to value reciprocity, and to experience true intimacy.
Peggy Orenstein (Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture)
The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Those who make withdrawals without making deposits, eventually find the relationship empty for future withdrawals
John Arthur (The Law Of Reciprocity (The Laws Of Friendship))
Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen, and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places were the state was destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form of state protection.
Timothy Snyder (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning)
The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods. When the natural world is understood as a gift instead of private property, there are ethical constraints on the accumulation of abundance that is not yours to own. Gifts are not meant to be hoarded, and thus made scarce for others, but given away, which generates sufficiency for all.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
Fairness and reciprocity are at the heart of good relationships. Emotionally mature people don’t like taking advantage of people, nor do they like the feeling of being used. They want to help and are generous with their time, but they also ask for attention and assistance when they need it. They’re willing to give more than they get back for awhile, but they won’t let an imbalance go on indefinitely.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
the ability to allow or even make room for reactivity in the other, without reciprocating, creates the best chance that both partners can go on to their next relationships with the least amount of emotional baggage.
Edwin H. Friedman (Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (The Guilford Family Therapy Series))
In the Anishinaabe worldview, it’s not just fruits that are understood as gifts, rather all of the sustenance that the land provides, from fish to firewood. Everything that makes our lives possible—the splints for baskets, roots for medicines, the trees whose bodies make our homes, and the pages of our books—is provided by the lives of more-than-human beings. This is always true whether it’s harvested directly from the forest or whether it’s mediated by commerce and harvested from the shelves of a store—it all comes from the Earth. When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
As you take your eyes off the false prize (of more, better, and different stuff), you put them on the real prizes: friends, family, sharing, caring, learning, meeting challenges, intimacy, rest, and being present, connected, and respected. In other words, those best things in life that are free. Like all things natural, building this wealth takes time, attention, patience, and reciprocity (that volleying of giving and receiving that builds relationships).
Vicki Robin (Your Money or Your Life)
To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
Simone de Beauvoir
Eye Contact Can Reveal if a Person is . . . • Shy or gregarious • Honest or deceitful • Confident or terrified • Interested or bored • Patient or irritated • Sincere or inauthentic • Organized or Unprepared • Attentive or distracted
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
Here’s how it happens: One person reveals something and waits to see if the other person will share something back. The reciprocity, if it comes, is a sign of understanding, validation, and caring. I’ve heard you, I understand and accept what you’re saying, and I care for you enough to disclose something about myself. An unresponsive partner—like a seatmate on a flight who puts on his headphones shortly after you make a comment—terminates the reciprocity, freezing the relationship.
Chip Heath (The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact)
Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Marxists would respond that capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor. All over the world, community in the broader sense-the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship- is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to capitalism's implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe;' creating "a world after its own image." No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
We poetically construct our identity as human beings, together with our values, largely through reciprocal relationships with animals. They provide us with essential points of reference, as well as illustrations of the qualities that we may choose to emulate or avoid in ourselves. Any major change in our relationships with animals, individual or collective, reverberates profoundly in our character as human beings, in ways that go far beyond immediately pragmatic concerns. When a species becomes extinct, something perishes in the human soul as well.
Boria Sax (The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in World Myth, Legend, and Literature)
I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.
Raven Leilani (Luster)
When you treat your time together as something he has to do, you’ve taken something that was a pleasure and made it a chore. If you are nice, but you give of yourself with strings attached, the demand for reciprocity will send him several steps backward. Whenever you make him feel as though he has to see you, it will feel like work. When it’s not an obligation to see you, the very same thing will feel like pleasure.
Sherry Argov (Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl-A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship)
It would be nice if the story ended differently - if he had burst into tears and professed his love for me; if he had said the same three words back and hugged me; if he had given it thought and then asked if we could try a relationship. But you know what? I said those three words to a boy who didn’t love me back, at least not in that way. He casually dropped a “love you” later on, and in a platonic ‘you have impacted my life’ way, he was telling the truth. But I knew. He had given it thought, and we were not on the same page. I built up all this courage to say “I love you” for the very first time, and I said those words to a person that couldn’t reciprocate them. But guess what? I don’t regret any of it.
Stephen Lovegrove (How to Find Yourself, Love Yourself, & Be Yourself: The Secret Instruction Manual for Being Human)
Colonial, white supremacist organizational practices seem inevitable because they were so universally adopted over the next centuries, and they still govern the great majority of our institutions, but they were design choices. This means that other choices are available, even when they seem far-fetched. We know what spices and organizations look like, feel like, and function like when they are inspired by the colonizers’ principles of separation, competition and exploitation. How would they be different if they were based on principles like integration and interdependence, reciprocity and relationship?
Edgar Villanueva (Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance)
Create reciprocity. I’ve never worried about giving away too much free information. In fact, the more generous a brand is, the more reciprocity they create. All relationships are give-and-take, and the more you give to your customers, the more likely they will be to give something back in the future. Give freely.
Donald Miller (Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen)
The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is—insofar as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research. (Einstein 1949, 683–684)
Albert Einstein (Autobiographical Notes)
Where fear is ever present you will never tire of pleasure in the relationship. It sounds brutal, but Stendhal is right. Life is brutal. I am living dangerously when I take a relationship for granted. Most people think climbing Everest is very risky, but things usually work out. However, taking reciprocal love for granted – I would never dare do that.
Erling Kagge (Silence: In the Age of Noise)
the general rules of reciprocity are not working with the NPD person. The relationship begins to operate more and more on his terms as if these are the only terms.
Eleanor D. Payson (The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family)
The cycle of reciprocity, rupture, and repair is the nature of healthy relationships.
Deb Dana (Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory)
When we disconnect from ourselves, we cannot truly connect with others
Leo Lourdes (A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being)
Making deposits in relationships are as important as making withdrawals.
John Arthur (The Law Of Reciprocity (The Laws Of Friendship))
Those who make withdrawals without making deposits, eventually find the relationship empty for future withdrawals.
John Arthur (The Law Of Reciprocity (The Laws Of Friendship))
Your eyes are the windows to your soul” indeed. It is a cliché for a good reason—it is a timeless truth with universal application.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated.
Alain de Botton (Essays In Love)
The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.
Ross Gay (Inciting Joy: Essays)
The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
Friendship should be fair. It becomes charity if you’re always the giver and the other person the receiver …and without reciprocation.
Mitta Xinindlu
When work relationships are reciprocal, ethical leadership emerges for both the executive and the participant unless the executive is trying to control the participant.
Peter J. Dean
Respectful, reciprocal, genuine relationships lie at the heart of the community life and community development
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples)
Does your primary relationship have love and respect and reciprocity and a sense of teamwork and belonging and mutual growth? I
Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
You deserve the level of peace you give to others.
Kierra C.T. Banks
Have the humility to receive from your friends no matter how little they contribute to your life.
John Arthur (The Law Of Reciprocity (The Laws Of Friendship))
She discovered a new word on TikTok: limerence. It means “an intense desire for someone, marked by intrusive thoughts and a desire for a relationship and reciprocation.
Elin Hilderbrand (The Academy (The Academy Series #1))
Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth… Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. ... Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
Meaningful eye contact has the power to transcend time and space to connect us with others and can be one of the most gracious and important ways to demonstrate attention and respect.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
TO MY MIND, THOUGH, there is a third development that has altered our parenting experience above all others, and that is the wholesale transformation of the child’s role, both in the home and in society. Since the end of World War II, childhood has been completely redefined. Today, we work hard to shield children from life’s hardships. But throughout most of our country’s history, we did not. Rather, kids worked. In the earliest days of our nation, they cared for their siblings or spent time in the fields; as the country industrialized, they worked in mines and textile mills, in factories and canneries, in street trades. Over time, reformers managed to outlaw child labor practices. Yet change was slow. It wasn’t until our soldiers returned from World War II that childhood, as we now know it, began. The family economy was no longer built on a system of reciprocity, with parents sheltering and feeding their children, and children, in return, kicking something back into the family till. The relationship became asymmetrical. Children stopped working, and parents worked twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses. The way most historians describe this transformation is to say that the child went from “useful” to “protected.” But the sociologist Viviana Zelizer came up with a far more pungent phrase. She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.” Today parents pour more capital—both emotional and literal—into their children than ever before, and they’re spending longer, more concentrated hours with their children than they did when the workday ended at five o’clock and the majority of women still stayed home. Yet parents don’t know what it is they’re supposed to do, precisely, in their new jobs. “Parenting” may have become its own activity (its own profession, so to speak), but its goals are far from clear.
Jennifer Senior (All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood)
In addition to beginning and maintaining relationships, many women have let established relationships slip away. Small occasions and important events with other people are missed: there are an increasing number of missed thank-you notes, missed birthdays, or invitations that are not reciprocated. The connections just aren’t kept up, and eventually they’re gone. They then anticipate scolding, rejection, or negative reactions when they think about trying to reconnect or rectify a situation, so they tend to avoid them altogether. While this may be true for everyone to some extent, women with AD/HD with particular histories or wounds are especially sensitive to and avoidant of this kind of potentially critical feedback further increasing the negative cycle.
Sari Solden (Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life)
I really think this kind of consensual cannibalism is such a perfect analogue for the reciprocal relationship between writer and reader, and especially between writers and readers of autobiography. The reader of an autobiography consumes the life of the author, and the author, in turn, consumes the life of the reader, that portion of it surrendered to reading, or listening to, the autobiography.
Mark Leyner (Gone with the Mind)
One simple glance can convey to your recipient that you are . . . • Present • Interested • Paying attention • Being respectful • Listening • Confident • Engaged • Caring • Dedicated • Appreciative • Empathetic • Focused • Supportive • Trustworthy • Acknowledging • Excited This list barely scratches the surface; however, it opens the conversation about how vital your eye contact is for making positive first impressions.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
He’d said that the relationship between Sith apprentice and Master was symbiotic but in a delicate balance. An apprentice owed his Master loyalty. A Master owed his apprentice knowledge and must show only strength. But the obligations were reciprocal and contingent. Should either fail in his obligation, it was the duty of the other to destroy him. The Force required it. Since before the Clone Wars, Vader’s Master had never shown anything but
Paul S. Kemp (Lords of the Sith)
Iosif was particularly fond of the youngest, the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Nadezhda, who reciprocated his feelings despite the twenty-three-year difference in their ages. To a young woman from a revolutionary family, he must have seemed like the ideal man: a tried-and-true revolutionary, brave and mysterious but also personable. In 1919 Stalin and Nadezhda tied the knot. As to the nature of their relationship before marriage, we can only guess.
Oleg V. Khlevniuk (Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator)
When you make eye contact with another person, you can send thousands of silent messages without even speaking a word. No wonder eye contact can be both a direct form of communication and an elusive attribute at the same time.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
As Rage Becomes Her author Soraya Chemaly said, One of the top three reasons women report getting angry is the lack of reciprocity in relationships. They feel taken for granted, uncared for, unloved, even as they’re providing care to parents, to children, to spouses, to friends, to coworkers to neighbors, whoever it may be. Being exhausted and fed up at the same time accumulates. I think a lot of the rage people feel is because for the entirety of their lives their needs were not being addressed or met fairly. But now, with the added stresses and exhaustion of this physical transition, that situation is not tenable. This—a lack of reciprocal care and attention—is not about hormones.
Heather Corinna (What Fresh Hell Is This?: Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You)
There are times when eye contact can move to the dark side and become creepy, hostile, rude, or condescending. When it is overused or made for the wrong reasons, eye contact can make others feel uncomfortable and leave a terrible impression . . . • obsessive staring • mocking • too much intensity • inappropriate focus • averting eyes • obvious contempt • gawking, ogling • casting the "evil eye" • over-watching • intimidating • unwelcome looks • rolling the eyes
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
I don't believe in 'ownership' of a sentient life - I think we undertake volitional guardianship and that this bringing forth can be one of the most rewarding and reciprocally loving relationships that a human being can ever experience.
Noel Fitzpatrick (Listening to the Animals: Becoming the Supervet)
Focussing on Karma than on the lessons needed to be learned is setting a trap for "what goes around comes around." Never wish for others what you will not wish for yourself. Do to others as you want done to you. That's what love is about!
Kemi Sogunle
Enumerating the gifts you’ve received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more. Data tell the story that there are “enough” food calories on the planet for all 8 billion of us to be nourished. And yet people are starving. Imagine the outcome if we each took only enough, rather than far more than our share. The wealth and security we crave could be met by sharing what we have. Ecopsychologists have shown that the practice of gratitude puts brakes on hyper-consumption. The relationships nurtured by gift thinking diminish our sense of scarcity and want. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver. Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequences of unrestrained taking by humans. Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
It entered into a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with North Korea in 1961, containing a clause on mutual defense against outside attack that is still in force at this writing. But that was more in the nature of the tributary relationship familiar from Chinese history: Beijing offered protection; North Korean reciprocity was irrelevant to the relationship. The Soviet alliance frayed from the very outset largely because Mao would not accept even the hint of subordination.
Henry Kissinger (On China)
God’s great aim has always been, and will forever be, relationship with us. Sometimes, He may deprive us of something in order to draw us to Someone. And when we reciprocate—when we decide that we want Him more than we want His stuff—the most amazing thing happens. We are rewired and our requests are either altered as we grow to know and to prefer what He wants for us, or they are simply answered because, in seeking first the kingdom of God, “all these things” are given to us as well (Matt 6:33).
Pete Greig (God on Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer)
As with most things in life, a healthy balance will keep us on the right path. To avoid too much eye contact or too little, seek to create a comfortable mix. It is generally encouraged to use more eye contact when you are listening and less when you are speaking.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source. The plant has in fact been up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color, because when it does so its evolutionary fitness is increased. When it is successful in enticing an animal such as me to disperse its fruit, its genes for making yumminess are passed on to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than those of the plant whose berries were inferior. The berries made by the plant shape the behaviors of the dispersers and have adaptive consequences. What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
This principle of reciprocity--a give-and-take in a relationship of balance--is not just some transaction done to advance one's own aims. Traditionally, Native Americans see reciprocity as a natural law of the universe and as crucial for humans to maintain harmony.
Randy Woodley (Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being)
Vulnerability is usually attacked, not with fists but with shaming. Many children learn quickly to cover up any signs of weakness, sensitivity, and fragility, as well as alarm, fear, eagerness, neediness, or even curiosity. Above all, they must never disclose that the teasing has hit its mark. Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves. When vulnerability is the enemy, it is attacked wherever it is perceived, even in a best friend. Signs of alarm may provoke verbal taunts such as “fraidy cat” or “chicken.” Tears evoke ridicule. Expressions of curiosity can precipitate the rolling of eyes and accusations of being weird or nerdy. Manifestations of tenderness can result in incessant teasing. Revealing that something caused hurt or really caring about something is risky around someone uncomfortable with his vulnerability. In the company of the desensitized, any show of emotional openness is likely to be targeted. The vulnerability engendered by peer orientation can be overwhelming even when children are not hurting one another. This vulnerability is built into the highly insecure nature of peer-oriented relationships. Vulnerability does not have to do only with what is happening but with what could happen — with the inherent insecurity of attachment. What we have, we can lose, and the greater the value of what we have, the greater the potential loss. We may be able to achieve closeness in a relationship, but we cannot secure it in the sense of holding on to it — not like securing a rope or a boat or a fixed interest-bearing government bond. One has very little control over what happens in a relationship, whether we will still be wanted and loved tomorrow. Although the possibility of loss is present in any relationship, we parents strive to give our children what they are constitutionally unable to give to one another: a connection that is not based on their pleasing us, making us feel good, or reciprocating in any way. In other words, we offer our children precisely what is missing in peer attachments: unconditional acceptance.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
Mirroring and matching works at the sub-conscious level and serves to make the other person feel more “comfortable” and connected to you. These subliminal actions can create a subconscious feeling of unison and connection that demonstrate how much you have in common.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
Whether it is in a sales situation, love at first sight, a husband and wife having an important conversation, a parent disciplining a child, or a teacher instructing her students, eye contact is a powerful body language for enriching engagement, focus, and communication.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss also believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn’t just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You’re beholden to the “spirit of the gift,” a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations.
Hua Hsu (Stay True)
Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They don’t keep score. They’re aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they’re not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.
Reid Hoffman (The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career)
Never Underestimate the Divine Strength of a Mother who appears Broken..... This phrase, in the most reciprocal form, is powerful. A broken woman is perceived as weak, battered, useless, and incapable, among many other low states of Human life, effortlessly causing her to think it might be best to lie down and die. The thought represents a desperation to escape a pain more powerful than she. There is, but one superseding power, greater than the pain itself. You take this woman, who loves her kids to the highest degree of unselfishness and give her a hint they’re suffering. A Divine Strength that can’t be seen, perhaps not even felt will ignite a fire within her from miles away. No one in its path will see it coming, not even her. This strength indicates that she will go beyond any limits to protect her offspring even if it means rising to her death. There’s no mountain too high, no fire too crucible, nor a fear she won’t face, to ensure they are safe, both mentally and physically. The best part is, no matter how broken down she appears, or how robbed she may be, no one can take from her, what they don’t know she possesses. Following the exhaustion of all other choices, this strength is activated, only when it’s most necessary. It may never be discovered in a lifetime by many, but you can bet it’s there when you need it most. It’s in every one of us, festering, waiting for what may be the last moments of life or death.
L. Yingling
It hurts when the one you love does not reciprocate your feelings. It hurts when all your efforts to set things straight go in vain. It hurts when you are unable to let go. It hurts when everything is rosy one moment and dark the next. All the emotions that are pent up inside you, suffocate you. The other person, it seems, has always been or becomes unemotional, unattached and either unaware or ignorant of your feelings. You are stuck at a place where there is no road ahead and you cannot find the road back home. ~ Lines from the Whispered Words article in June issue of Writer's Ezine
Arti Honrao
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we carry forward the basic insight our fundamental relationship to the world is one of love. Christians say that “God is Love,” that God created the universe out of love. The source of God’s Creation is love, and our relationship to the possibility of meaning within this created world is in and through love. The Christian community is a reciprocal relationship among subjects who love and are loved. The subject maintains the meaning of God’s Creation by taking up a Christ-like love toward others. The appearance of meaning in the world—love’s product—is always a manifestation of the divine. Liberalism turns away from this entire tradition of thought, in party because of its association with religion, and in part because this tradition resists the analytic form of reason. For liberalism, religion is individualized and privatized, and thus it cannot be used in the explanation or justification of a public space. If it does invade the public, it threatens irrationality. But religion is no less an effort to understand the character of our experience, and even a secular philosophy must not ignore that experience. We cannot simply deny what we cannot place within our categories of analysis. (221)
Paul W. Kahn (Putting Liberalism in Its Place)
Ecopsychologists have shown that the practice of gratitude puts brakes on hyperconsumption. The relationships nurtured by gift thinking diminish our sense of scarcity and want. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
Human courtship, like courtship in other animals, has a typical time-course. Courtship effort is low when first assessing a sexual prospect, increases rapidly if the prospect reciprocates one's interest, peaks when the prospect is deciding whether to copulate, and declines once a long-term relationship is established.
Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature)
In humans, the ability to strengthen one’s readiness to face potential trauma without transforming life itself into an act of interminable vigilance, depends on a relationship with an important other who relates to your subjective states as important to him or her—and to whose mental states you can reciprocally relate.
Jean Petrucelli (Knowing, Not-Knowing and Sort-of-Knowing)
I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which reduces every to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiples every it is shared rather than depreciating with use.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
It’s kind of weird when you think about it; the idea that telling someone that you love them, that you really care about them, will somehow ruin a relationship. I guess it happens, especially if someone doesn’t reciprocate, but doesn’t everyone want to be told that they’re loved? That they’re special to someone? How can that be a bad thing?
Jacqueline E. Smith (Boy Band (Boy Band #1))
When speakers make eye contact with an audience, they will be perceived as being more prepared, more competent, confident, and trustworthy. Eye contact helps to relax the speaker and reminds them that their audience is made up of separate individuals who perceive things differently. Audience response is clearly seen in the expressions of their eyes.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
most of the time the attention that my “prettiness” garnered meant that men viewed me as an object, and men don’t respect objects. After all, objects are something we use without reciprocity; it’s a one-sided relationship. It’s why they didn’t handle my rejection well and called me “frigid”—because objects aren’t supposed to have their own desires and motivations.
Florence Given (Women Don't Owe You Pretty)
Typical relationship books, they are about communicating more clearly, being more loving, and making time for your relationship. All of this is lovely advice, only if the other person is noticing or listening! Kierkegaard noted that “Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved.” The challenge is that when this expression is not met with any reciprocity, and in fact the opposite, it can be exhausting and demoralising. If you love more, then you will get more back. It’s not that linear, and while that may apply in a factory— work harder, make more widgets—it does not work in relationships, least of all with a narcissist. Personality patterns tend to be pretty entrenched—and the rules of rescue do not apply.
Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
Recognition for us is about presence, about profound listening, and about recognizing and affirming the light in each other as a mechanism for nurturing and strengthening internal relationships to our Nishnaabeg worlds. It is a core part of our political systems because they are rooted in our bodies and our bodies are not just informed by but created and maintained by relationships of deep reciprocity. Our bodies exist only in relation to Indigenous complex, nonlinear constructions of time, space, and place that are continually rebirthed through the practice and often coded recognition of obligations and responsibilities within a nest of diversity, freedom, consent, noninterference, and a generated, proportional, emergent reciprocity.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas))
Being culturally aware and respectful of others’ cultures will help you to keep the habit of making eye contact in context. As a matter of fact, in some parts of the world making eye contact can be construed as being exactly the opposite of what I am sharing in these pages. Making a great first impression is always about the specific environment and circumstance, isn’t it?
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
We've all been in the middle of a conversation and the person with whom we are speaking breaks eye contact, appears distracted, glazes over, or looks elsewhere. Their simple eye movement can quickly break down communications by making us feel ignored, dismissed, or rejected. For some, it may be accidental and unintentional, while for others, avoiding eye contact is on purpose.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
Unhealthy narcissism is occurring when an individual excessively pursues admiration, attention, status, understanding, support, money, power, control, or perfection in some form. It also means that the NPD person is not able to recognize, other than superficially, the feelings and needs of others. The rules of reciprocity are not operating in the relationship. This is not to say that NPD individuals don't often shower others with attention, gifts, or favors. Indeed, they often do. But the ultimate goal is always for some kind of return. The giving may be to foster a certain image or an overall feeling of indebtedness in you, such as an IOU note to be called in at some other time. You, of course, would rather believe you received the gift because you are cared for and valued.
Eleanor D. Payson (The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family)
Instead, good and harmonious life—súmac káusai, alli káusai—should be “the goal or mission of every human effort.” Such a life emerges from ongoing “reciprocity and solidarity” within the human community and between the human community and the biodiversity and spirits of the forest of which people are a part. Western development destroys these relationships, imposing itself by “blood and fire.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Chateaubriand writes of René, his personification, ‘it wearied him to be loved’ – on le fatigait en l’aimant. I realized with astonishment that this experience was identical to my own, and so I couldn’t deny its validity. The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions! Of seeing yourself – when what you wanted was to remain forever free – transformed into a delivery boy whose duty is to reciprocate, to have the decency not to flee, lest anyone think that you’re cavalier towards emotions and would reject the loftiest sentiment that a human soul can offer. The weariness of your existence becoming absolutely dependent on a relationship with someone else’s feeling! The weariness of having to feel something, of having to love at least a little in return, even if it’s not a true reciprocity!
Fernando Pessoa
If a fountain could jet bouquets of chrome yellow in dazzling arches of chrysanthemum fireworks, that would be Canada Goldenrod. Each three-foot stem is a geyser of tiny gold daisies, ladylike in miniature, exuberant en masse. Where the soil is damp enough, they stand side by side with their perfect counterpart, New England Asters. Not the pale domesticates of the perennial border, the weak sauce of lavender or sky blue, but full-on royal purple that would make a violet shrink. The daisylike fringe of purple petals surrounds a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden-orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod. Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning. Purple and gold, the heraldic colors of the king and queen of the meadow, a regal procession in complementary colors. I just wanted to know why. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other. In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair. Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. It’s a testable hypothesis; it’s a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty. Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both. The question of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent on each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is - insofar as it is thinkable at all - primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system.
Albert Einstein
From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the “gift” is deemed to be “free” because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)
The author clearly yearns for food - for a life based on reciprocity, not exploitation, and he believes that plants count as partners, as participants. Having included them in the "us" of sentience and agency, he can't just take. He needs to know that he is giving back, part of a circle of exchange, instead of a one-way extraction that he identifies as death. This sentence embodies one of the impulses that is salutary in the vegetarian myth: the attempt to take humans down from our perch above and return us to our hones place in a circle. But it also reflects the ignorance. He doesn't know that apples eat, and what they eat is animals, including us. They need our excrement - the nitrogen, the minerals, the microbes - and our flesh and bones. There is a reciprocal relationship between animals and plants: predator and prey, until the prey becomes predator. It is only our attempt to remove ourselves from that circle that destroys it.
Lierre Keith (The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (Flashpoint Press))
In most cases, however, another step needs to take place before we can expect the other party to connect with what is going on in us. Because it will often be difficult for others to receive our feelings and needs in such situations, if we want them to hear us we would need first to empathize with them. The more we empathize with what leads them to behave in the ways that are not meeting our needs, the more likely it is that they will be able to reciprocate afterwards.
Marshall B. Rosenberg (Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides))
Most narcissistic people start their game strong and, as noted earlier, they are overflowing with charm, charisma, and confidence—the three seductive Cs. I maintain my assertion that these traits should leave you very concerned because, in some ways, they are distractors. They can pull you away from digging deeper and understanding the other person or really paying attention to the core qualities that make for a strong relationship, including respect, empathy, compromise, reciprocity, and kindness. In
Ramani S. Durvasula ("Don't You Know Who I Am?": How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility)
The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is - insofar as it is thinkable at all - primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist
Albert Einstein
On July 4, 1992, one of my heroes and inspirations, Thurgood Marshall, gave a speech that deeply resonates today. “We cannot play ostrich,” he said. “Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. . . . We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust.” This book grows out of that call to action, and out of my belief that our fight must begin and end with speaking truth. I believe there is no more important and consequential antidote for these times than a reciprocal relationship of trust. You give and you receive trust. And one of the most important ingredients in a relationship of trust is that we speak truth. It matters what we say. What we mean. The value we place on our words—and what they are worth to others. We cannot solve our most intractable problems unless we are honest about what they are, unless we are willing to have difficult conversations and accept what facts make plain.
Kamala Harris (The Truths We Hold: An American Journey)
I’ve always been a person who has believed in the love and in the power of love. It occurred to me that it is an essence which connects to the hearts of people, to the hearts of the beasts and to the One-Above-All.…… .…………. Sometimes, if people are dysfunctional together, they will have dysfunctional families and kids who are dysfunctional to the society, each in a unique disorderly way. Love, is the key to disorder and anarchy as it emanates from truth and then further emanates commitment, care, respect and sacrifice. It has the powers over emotions of a human and their mindset and it has been bringing changes to the lives of people. The problem of dysfunctional relationships is the connection is based upon truths which are not mutually established. To make a relationship functional is very much possible and is as essential to being human as the fact that we are very intelligent beings. A love based on truth will always shine brighter in any dark night. But who wants a love like that? And who dares to love as such? All that forever? Would you dare?.…………. ……. All that and many things more but not anymore. I now believe that only love cannot make anyone do everything. Neither everything is dearly loved nor it is reciprocated gracefully. Some loves fall away as the leaves of the autumn; some fires are washed by little waters; and some boats never make it to the shore. If love is truly your goal and the goal of your love is love itself then the pillars of love shall always remain true. Be good to the people you meet. And be good to those who hurt you as well. Someday, sometime, it will make sense to everyone.
Huseyn Raza
Most of us only put in as much effort as a situation requires from us. If we can 'get away' with being less considerate or less reciprocal, and various other forms of 'getting without giving,' many of us will, not because we're evil, but simply because we can. If people demanded or expected more of us we would do more, but when they don't, we don't make the effort. This dynamic is true in practically every relationship we have. When our self-esteem is low and we expect very little of others, we are likely to get very little from them as well.
Guy Winch (Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries)
To set the record straight, love has everything to do with it. Love for ourselves. Love that demands to be reciprocated because we know we are willing to give everything and we want everything in return. Love that is willing to speak up and say, “I need more attention. I deserve respect and deep affection. I’m not going to settle for anything less.” The sweet old fashioned notion demands to be rewritten as one that doesn’t set itself up as a repeatedly broken heart that stems from an insecure woman with a fancy notion of what love is supposed to look and feel like.
Mishi McCoy
Money is thus the general overturning of individualities… and adds contradictory attributes...for the entire objective world of man and nature, from standpoint of its possessor [money] it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory property and object...It makes contractions embrace. Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love for only love, trust for trust… your real individual… evoking love in return… does not produce reciprocal love… then your love is impotent— a misfortune.
-Karl Marx, Economic And Philosophic manuscripts of 1844, P.140
Trading favors, the relationship tit for tat that social scientists call reciprocal altruism, was long thought to be the basic backbone of friendship. But recent research has revealed that we actually care less about 'fairness' with our friends than we do when dealing with strangers and acquaintances. In a friendship, when either person insists on repaying a favor it's seen as signaling a weakness in the relationship. Friendship is what happens beyond the tracking of favors.... Among the traits exclusive to -Homo sapiens-, altruism and selflessness are near the top of what makes us human.
Billy Baker (We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends)
The gender imbalance in unpaid work is such a compelling subject for me in part because it’s a common burden that binds many women together, but also because the causes of the imbalance run so deep that you cannot solve them with a technical fix. You have to renegotiate the relationship. To me, no question is more important than this one: Does your primary relationship have love and respect and reciprocity and a sense of teamwork and belonging and mutual growth? I believe all of us ask ourselves this question in one way or another—because I think it is one of the greatest longings of life.
Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
To varying degrees, all pathological narcissists are selfish, self-consumed, demanding, entitled, and controlling. They are exploitative people who rarely or selectively reciprocate any form of generosity. Pathological narcissists are only empathetic or sensitive to others when doing so results in a tangible reward for themselves and/or when it makes them feel valued, important, and appreciated. Because narcissists are deeply impacted by their personal shame and loneliness, but consciously unaware of it, they do not end their relationships. Positive treatment results are rare for narcissists.
Ross Rosenberg (The Human Magnet Syndrome: The Codependent Narcissist Trap)
For most people passing through the urban park across from my house, the cottonwood is past its prime- scarred by fire…soon to be marked with a large red X by the crew… For me, he’s a presence in my life that’s hard to describe. Martin Buber, in I and Thou, spoke of two different ways of relating to a tree. On the one hand, he said, “I can assign it to a species and observe it as an…object. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I’m drawn into a relationship, and the tree ceases to be an It.” Buber and his tree were able to enter into a mystery of reciprocity.
Belden C. Lane
7 Ways to Improve Eye Contact at any Time 1. Relax into the moment by smiling. 2. Practice making eye contact with people you trust, so that when you are with strangers, it is easier to form a connection. 3. When you feel uncomfortable, begin by looking at their mouth or forehead. 4. Lean in and show that you are interested and attentive. 5. Put a little space between you and the other person. 6. Remember that the other person may be feeling just as awkward. 7. Don’t give them a blank stare throughout a conversation. Rather, practice gazing down or to the side every few moments so that you appear relaxed.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
Define your limits: You must decide what you will or will not tolerate. Pay attention to feelings of resentment: Such feelings let you know when someone has been forcefully imposing their personal expectations, views, demands, or values on you without your consent or interest. Be direct or be silent: There are two ways to set boundaries. First, be direct with the person or people crossing your boundaries by telling them how you feel when they engage in the behaviors that create your discomfort. This method works best in relationships that are mutually reciprocal and open to feedback. With toxic people, the second method—
Sherrie Campbell (Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut)
A man with strongly, in fact exclusively, religious interests, showed markedly this characteristic of helping people without really feeling for them. He said: 'I've no real emotional relations with people. I can't reciprocate tenderness. I can cry and suffer with people. I can help people, but when they stop suffering I'm finished. I can't enter into folks' joys and laughter. I can do things for people but shrink from them if they start thanking me.' His suffering with people was in fact his identifying himself as a suffering person with anyone else who suffered. Apart from that he allowed no emotional relationship to arise.
Harry Guntrip (Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self (Karnac Classics))
Your soulmate never makes you chase them; they might challenge your idleness or lack of initiative, but they never play games with you. You never really count who contributes more in a soulmate relationship. The giving process happens naturally and intuitively, balanced on both sides.This creates abundance and there is never any scarcity in the relationship. True love means reciprocity. Both of you recognise each other as the One. There is no perfect person, but there is a person who is perfect for you. What makes them perfect for you, apart from their wonderful qualities and suiting personality traits, is the mere fact that they chose YOU.
R.P. Heaven (Awakening Ignited)
Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6:13', where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain) that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere's disposition towards the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can't rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowing, as far as it is concerned. But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’. Thus if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think that such-and-such things are the case about you, but can't be certain that I am right. It means that I stand in a certain sort of relation of care towards you, that entails me in certain kinds of ways of behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you the responsibility of certain ways of acting and being as well. It is an acting ‘as if’ certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. It has the characteristic right-hemisphere qualities of being a betweenness: a reverberative, ‘re-sonant’, ‘respons-ible’ relationship, in which each party is altered by the other and by the relationship between the two, whereas the relationship of the believer to the believed in the left-hemisphere sense is inert, unidirectional, and centres on control rather than care. I think this is what Wittgenstein was trying to express when he wrote that ‘my’ attitude towards the other is an ‘attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’ An ‘opinion’ would be a weak form of knowledge: that is not what is meant by a belief, a disposition or an ‘attitude’. This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a question of a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’, assuming for the moment that the expression ‘a factual answer’ has a meaning. It is having an attitude, holding a disposition towards the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world, but also alters me. Is it true that God exists? Truth is a disposition, one of being true to someone or something. One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition towards the world, that being in itself a disposition. Some people choose to believe in materialism; they act ‘as if’ such a philosophy were true. An answer to the question whether God exists could only come from my acting ‘as if’ God is, and in this way being true to God, and experiencing God (or not, as the case might be) as true to me. If I am a believer, I have to believe in God, and God, if he exists, has to believe in me. Rather like Escher's hands, the belief must arise reciprocally, not by a linear process of reasoning. This acting ‘as if’ is not a sort of cop-out, an admission that ‘really’ one does not believe what one pretends to believe. Quite the opposite: as Hans Vaihinger understood, all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than an acting ‘as if’ certain models were, for the time being, true. Truth and belief, once more, as in their etymology, are profoundly connected. It is only the left hemisphere that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.
Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World)
But it is the nature of narcissistic entitlement to see the situation from only one very subjective point of view that says “My feelings and needs are all that matter, and whatever I want, I should get.” Mutuality and reciprocity are entirely alien concepts, because others exist only to agree, obey, flatter, and comfort – in short, to anticipate and meet my every need. If you cannot make yourself useful in meeting my need, you are of no value and will most likely be treated accordingly, and if you defy my will, prepare to feel my wrath. Hell hath no fury like the Narcissist denied. Narcissists hold these unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves uniquely special. In social situations, you will talk about them or what they are interested in because they are more important, more knowledgeable, or more captivating than anyone else. Any other subject is boring and won’t hold interest, and, in their eyes, they most certainly have a right to be entertained. In personal relationships, their sense of entitlement means that you must attend to their needs but they are under no obligation to listen to or understand you. If you insist that they do, you are “being difficult” or challenging their rights. How dare you put yourself before me? they seem to (or may actually) ask. And if they have real power over you, they feel entitled to use you as they see fit and you must not question their authority. Any failure to comply will be considered an attack on their superiority. Defiance of their will is a narcissistic injury that can trigger rage and self-righteous aggression. The conviction of entitlement is a holdover from the egocentric stage of early childhood, around the age of one to two, when children experience a natural sense of grandiosity that is an essential part of their development. This is a transitional phase, and soon it becomes necessary for them to integrate their feelings of self-importance and invincibility with an awareness of their real place in the overall scheme of things that includes a respect for others. In some cases, however, the bubble of specialness is never popped, and in others the rupture is too harsh or sudden, as when a parent or caretaker shames excessively or fails to offer soothing in the wake of a shaming experience. Whether overwhelmed with shame or artificially protected from it, children whose infantile fantasies are not gradually transformed into a more balanced view of themselves in relation to others never get over the belief that they are the center of the universe. Such children may become self-absorbed “Entitlement monsters,” socially inept and incapable of the small sacrifices of Self that allow for reciprocity in personal relationships. The undeflated child turns into an arrogant adult who expects others to serve as constant mirrors of his or her wonderfulness. In positions of power, they can be egotistical tyrants who will have their way without regard for anyone else. Like shame, the rage that follows frustrated entitlement is a primitive emotion that we first learn to manage with the help of attuned parents. The child’s normal narcissistic rages, which intensify during the power struggles of age eighteen to thirty months – those “terrible twos” – require “optimal frustration” that is neither overly humiliating nor threatening to the child’s emerging sense of Self. When children encounter instead a rageful, contemptuous or teasing parent during these moments of intense arousal, the image of the parent’s face is stored in the developing brain and called up at times of future stress to whip them into an aggressive frenzy. Furthermore, the failure of parental attunement during this crucial phase can interfere with the development of brain functions that inhibit aggressive behavior, leaving children with lifelong difficulties controlling aggressive impulses.
Sandy Hotchkiss (Why Is It Always About You?)
Some powerful feminist thinkers call us to remember that gift giving is among the most primal of human relationships. Each of us begins our life as the recipient in what Genevieve Vaughan has called a “maternal gift economy,” the flow of “goods and services” from mother to newborn. When the mother nurses her child, the boundary of the individual self becomes permeable and the common good is the only one that matters. The maternal gift economy is a biological imperative. There is no meritocracy or earning of sustenance. Mothers do not sell their milk to their babies, it is pure gift, so that life can continue. The currency of this economy is the flow of gratitude, the flow of love, literally in support of life. By analogy, can the sustenance from the breast of Mother Earth be understood as a maternal gift economy? These feminist thinkers argue that giving and taking in this sense are a fundamental way of caring for each other, without the intervention of states or markets. Scholars like Miki Kashtan are exploring how the philosophy and practice of a maternal gift economy might move social organization toward justice and sustainability. If the Sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, what is the “Sun” of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
In a traditional Anishinaabe economy, the land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another. The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual. Receiving a gift from the land is coupled to attached responsibilities of sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude—of which you will be reminded. This kind of gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” Not an automatic ritual of “manners,” but a recognition of indebtedness that can stop you in your tracks—it brings you the realization that your life is nurtured from the body of Mother Earth. With my fingers sticky with berry juice, I’m reminded that my life is contingent upon the lives of others, without whom, I simply would not exist. Water is life, food is life, soil is life—and they become our lives through the paired miracles of photosynthesis and respiration. All that we need to live flows through the land. It is not an empty metaphor that we call her Mother Earth. Food in our mouths is the thread that connects us in a relationship simultaneously spiritual and physical, as our bodies get fed and our spirits nourished by a sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. I have no claim to these berries, and yet here they are in my bucket, a gift.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
12 Reasons Why People Avoid Eye Contact 1. They do not want to reveal their feelings. 2. They are not being honest and truthful. 3. It makes them feel vulnerable and exposed. 4. They are being rude or indifferent. 5. They are ashamed or embarrassed to talk about something. 6. They are nervous or lacking confidence. 7. It makes them feel very uncomfortable. 8. They are arrogant, snobby, and pretentious. 9. They are afraid of saying the wrong thing or looking stupid. 10. They are shy or introverted. 11. They are accessing internal thoughts or emotions to process and contemplate information. 12. Or as mentioned before, and important to remember, it may simply be a cultural value or behavior.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
Knowledge is not an encounter between two separate things - a knowing subject and a known object. Knowledge, or better, knowing is a relationship in which knower and known are like the poles in a magnetic field. Human beings are aware of a world because, and only because, it is the sort of world that breeds knowing organisms. Humanity is not one thing and the world another; it has always been difficult for us to see that any organism is so embedded in its environment that the evolution of so complex and intelligent a creature as man could never have come to pass without a reciprocal evolution of the environ­ment. An intelligent man argues, without any resort to supernaturalism, an intelligent universe.
Alan W. Watts (The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity)
The message of EFT is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Adult attachments may be more reciprocal and less centered on physical contact, but the nature of the emotional bond is the same. EFT focuses on creating and strengthening this emotional bond between partners by identifying and transforming the key moments that foster an adult loving relationship: being open, attuned, and responsive to each other.
Sue Johnson (Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships)
1. Did you conduct one-to-one meetings with each salesperson on your team? 2. Did you ask each of them how they like to be managed? Are they coachable? 3. Did you inquire about their prior experience with their past manager? Was it positive or negative? 4. Did you set the expectations of your relationship with them? Did you ask them what they needed and expected from their manager? What changes do they want to see? 5. Did you inform them about how you like to manage and your style of management? This would open up the space for a discussion regarding how you may manage differently from your predecessor. 6. Did you let them know you just completed a coaching course that would enable you to support them even further and maximize their talents? 7. Did you explain to them the difference between coaching and traditional management? 8. Did you enroll them in the benefits of coaching? That is, what would be in it for them? 9. Did you let them know about your intentions, goals, expectations, and aspirations for each of them and for the team as a whole? 10. How have you gone about learning the ins and outs of the company?Are you familiar with the internal workings, culture, leadership team, and subtleties that make the company unique? Have you considered that your team may be the best source of knowledge and intelligence for this? Did you communicate your willingness and desire to learn from them as well, so that the learning and development process can be mutually reciprocated?
Keith Rosen (Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions: A Tactical Playbook for Managers and Executives)
Consider him indulgently: the Egoist is the Son of Himself. He is likewise the Father. And the son loves the father, the father the son; they reciprocate affection through the closest of ties; and shall they view behaviour unkindly wounding either of them, not for each other's dear sake abhorring the criminal? They would not injure you, but they cannot consent to see one another suffer or crave in vain. The two rub together in sympathy besides relationship to an intenser one. Are you, without much offending, sacrificed by them, it is on the altar of their mutual love, to filial piety or paternal tenderness: the younger has offered a dainty morsel to the elder, or the elder to the younger. Absorbed in their great example of devotion do they not think of you. They are beautiful.
George Meredith (The Egoist)
As stated earlier, intimacy is greatly enhanced when two people dialogue about all aspects of their experience. This is especially true when they transcend taboos against full emotional communication. Feelings of love, appreciation and gratitude are naturally enhanced when we reciprocally show our full selves - confident or afraid, loving or alienated, proud or embarrassed. What an incredible achievement it is when any two of us create such an authentic and supportive relationship! Many of the most intimate relationships that I have seen are between people who have done a great deal of freeing themselves from the negative legacies of their upbringings. “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living” A further silver lining in recovery is the attainment of a much richer internal life.
Pete Walker (Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving)
When these red flags appeared early on, the narrative was “shaped” in a way that was at times romantic, passionate, and even practical. The old saying of “love is blind” applies here, and before these patterns set in, hope is often what allows people to look the other way when the red flags arise. Over time, the narratives become a bit more realistic, hope begins to fade, and it becomes brutally clear that these patterns of mistrust, anger, and deceit are here to stay. A human relationship should not be built on what you can do for someone, but simply on a mutual partnership. A narcissistic relationship can often devolve into superficial attributes, such as jobs, schools, titles, resources, addresses, photo-shopped images, status posts, quiet children, well-appointed homes, and possessions.
Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
people in hunter-gatherer communities shared about 25 percent, while people in societies who regularly engage in trade gave away about 45 percent. Although religion was a modest factor in making people more generous, the strongest predictor was “market integration,” defined as “the percentage of a household’s total calories that were purchased from the market, as opposed to homegrown, hunted, or fished.” Why? Because, the authors conclude, trust and cooperation with strangers lowers transaction costs and generates greater prosperity for all involved, and thus market fairness norms “evolved as part of an overall process of societal evolution to sustain mutually beneficial exchanges in contexts where established social relationships (for example, kin, reciprocity, and status) were insufficient.”57
Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
One of the things necessary for healing to take place is recognizing the truth of the relationship and that person. You experienced so many covert lies; it is incredibly helpful to be able to see clearly. The truth is you were in love with an illusion, with the person they portrayed themselves to be. At first, this is an excruciating realization. You will doubt and wonder if you are overinflating this, if they really are innocent and you’re just scared to move on. You will have a ton of self-doubt. Eventually, with education and support, you will see that your hunch, your inner knowing, is on target. In time the truth that you were in love with an illusion will feel like a relief because truth does set you free. That full realization will validate years of confusion you felt, years of unexplained exhaustion and health issues, years of sexual confusion, years of feeling less than, and years of unhappiness, along with anxiety. You lived in an unsafe environment, were demeaned and devalued for years (decades for some of you; entire childhoods for many of you). You did not experience unconditional love; you did not live with someone who treated you with respect, who cherished you, treasured you, and felt so lucky to have you in their life. No, the truth is you experienced a counterfeit. If this was a spouse or romantic partner, this awakening to the truth is excruciating because you did love that person with all your heart. You were dedicated. You were in 100%. The truth is that you were the lifeforce in the relationship. When you’re really honest with yourself, when you look back with clear vision, that life, that love you gave and felt, was never fully reciprocated.
Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse)
In any case, I am willing to acknowledge that my genitor, in going after me, was behaving naturally [Manuel’s father wanted to have him aborted, as he was conceived in an accidental encounter, but his mother refused]. As an anarch, I have to admit that he was protecting his rights. To be sure, this is based on reciprocity. Our city teems with sons who have escaped their fathers in a similar way. Usually, this remains obscure. The Oedipal relationship is reduced to a malaise between individuals. The loss of esteem is inevitable, but people get along with one another. Moreover, I am troubled less by my background than by the respect that my old man demands on the basis of his paternity. He cites a credit that is not his due: the fact that fathers, rulers, professors once lived and deserved this name. Nowadays, that is nothing but a rumor.
Ernst Jünger (Eumeswil)
Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. Can we imagine a human economy with a currency which emulates the flow from Mother Earth? A currency of gifts? When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don’t mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal “payment.” I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of berries through an ecosystem. We ecologists think about the currency of ecosystems in terms of biogeochemistry—the cycling of life’s materials, between the living and the not.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World)
We all have some of what may be termed narcissistic needs, such as the need to be valued, admired, understood, or simply recognized as a unique person. During painful periods, we become much more narcissistic, or self-centered, and our demands for attention, mirroring, validation, etc. increase. However, when we feel better, we generally return to a baseline ability to reciprocate in our relationships. Instead of only taking, we give-and-take by listening, understanding, validating, and supporting others. For NPD individuals, however, they feel endlessly entitled to special consideration and attention. The narcissist somehow never moves past the unique circumstance that requires you to put yourself aside and realize that what's happening for him is more special, more upsetting, or more wonderful. Eventually, you realize that you and your needs are on indefinite hold.
Eleanor D. Payson (The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family)
they feel ignored, unappreciated, and unloved. That’s because their context-blind Aspie family members are so poor at empathic reciprocity. As we have learned, we come to know ourselves in relation to others. This doesn’t just apply when children are developing self-esteem. Throughout our lifespan, we continue to weave and re-weave the context of our lives, based on the interactions we have with our friends, coworkers, neighbors and loved ones. This is why it is so important for an NT parent/partner to get feedback from their spouse. A smile, a hug, a kind word, a note of encouragement: These are messages that reinforce the NT’s self-esteem and contribute to a healthy reciprocity in the relationship. Without these daily reminders from their loved ones, NTs can develop some odd defense mechanisms. One is to become psychologically invisible to others and even to themselves.
Kathy J. Marshack (Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Parenting with a Partner with Asperger Syndrome)
CHAPTER 2: The Language Of Trust Trust each other again and again. When the trust level gets high enough, people transcend apparent limits, discovering new and awesome abilities for which they were previously unaware. — David Armistead Trust is fundamental to our sense of safety, autonomy and dignity as human beings. It is also an integral part of every relationship we have. When we trust someone we feel safe to share what is important to us including our thoughts, ideas, efforts, hopes, and concerns. When others trust us they reciprocate in kind. It doesn’t mean we always agree, just that we listen to, respect, and value what each other has to offer. In fact, trust allows us to disagree, debate, and test each other’s thinking as we work together to find ideas and solutions. Having work relationships built on trust allows us to get better, faster results, with less stress.
Charles Feltman (The Thin Book of Trust; An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work)
Când încearcă să îi facă pe plac bărbatului, femeia are inițiative - doar ea, de fapt: ea sună, dă mesaje, dă like-uri pe Facebook sau îi trimite lui articole interesante, face invitații concrete la film, la concerte. L-a plăcut, a pus ochii pe el și începe curtarea. (Însă peste ani, tot ea va regreta că n-a fost și ea curtată. Că a trebuit să cucerească ea bărbatul.) El o iubește, însă ea nu se simte ca și cum ar fi iubită de un bărbat. Cât a fost ea femeie, și cât a fost el bărbat? ... Unii bărbați pot răspunde pozitiv curtării, însă, ca un bărbat să construiască o relație sănătoasă cu o femeie, trebuie să aibă și el o cotribuție la relație: să inițieze, să curteze, să simtă că ceea ce oferă este de valoare și femeia se simte bine alături de el. ... Iubirea înseamnă întotdeauna reciprocitate. Sunt relații în care ne maturizăm și noi, femeile, și bărbații. Nu cred în iubirile neîmpărtășite. El nu e sigur, nu e hotărât că vrea să fiți împreună? Crede-l pe cuvânt, nu te mai amăgi!
Domnica Petrovai (Iubește și fii iubit(ă): (aproape) totul despre relația de cuplu)
They Give Back Fairness and reciprocity are at the heart of good relationships. Emotionally mature people don’t like taking advantage of people, nor do they like the feeling of being used. They want to help and are generous with their time, but they also ask for attention and assistance when they need it. They’re willing to give more than they get back for awhile, but they won’t let an imbalance go on indefinitely. If you grew up with emotionally immature parents, you may face your own challenges with reciprocity, having learned to give either too much or not enough. Your parents’ self-preoccupied demands may have distorted your natural instincts about fairness. If you were an internalizer, you learned that in order to be loved or desirable, you need to give more than you get; otherwise you’ll be of no value to others. If you were an externalizer, you may have the false belief that others don’t really love you unless they prove it by always putting you first and repeatedly overextending themselves for you.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
We can no longer speak Evil. All we can do is discourse on the rights of man - a discourse which is pious, weak, useless and hypocritical, its supposed value deriving from the Enlightenment belief in a natural attraction of the Good, from an idealized view of human relationships (whereas Evil can manifestly be dealt with only by means of Evil). What is more, even this Good qua ideal value is invariably deployed in a self-defensive, austerity-loving, negative and reactive mode. All the talk is of the minimizing of Evil, the prevention of violence: nothing but security. This is the condescending and depressive power of good intentions, a power that can dream of nothing except rectitude in the world, that refuses even to consider a bending of Evil, or an intelligence of Evil. There can be a 'right' to speech only if speech is defined as the 'free' expression of an individual. Where speech is conceived of as a form implying reciprocity, collusion, antagonism or seduction, the notion of right can have no possible meaning.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
For every relationship involves two related terms. Sometimes relationships are not real in either term, but arise from the way we think of the terms: we think identity, for example, by thinking one thing twice over and relating it to itself; and occasionally we relate what exists to what does not exist, or generate purely logical relations like that of genus to species. Sometimes relationships are real in both terms: grounded in the quantity of both, in the case of relationships like big/small or double/half, or in their activity and passivity, in the case of causal relationships, like mover-moved and father/son. Sometimes relationships are real in only one of the terms, with the other merely thought of as related [reciprocally] to that one; and this happens whenever the two terms exist at different levels. Thus seeing and understanding really relates us to things, but being seen and understood by us is not something real in the things; and similarly a pillar to the right of us does not itself have a left and a right.
Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation)
We need to rationalize our existences, usually by doing something that feels “important.” Our inner worlds are devalued, because others cannot directly observe them. Many people remain “do-ers.” Doing things to make up for their belief that they themselves are “not enough.” In relationships when your partner is not engaging in a mutual way, and you feel that the only way to keep the relationship afloat and to keep your partner content is to keep doing things—stay fit, look good, clean the house, make his life easy, buy her things— then that becomes your pattern. In addition, you may need to be yet another bringer of admiration into your partner’s life telling him,“you are so attractive/smart/successful/sexy/cool/awesome.” All this stuff you need to bring, day after day after day, can be labeled narcissistic supply. Psychologically healthy human beings nourish themselves from the inside. They do not “need” supply, and other people in their worlds should not be in the role of having to serve them that way. You may get some insight into why this relationship has been so exhausting.
Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
A woman’s heart is her prized possession and if she shares it with you, consider yourself blessed. It is vital to her very being; it has the capability to pump life-giving love into every living cell of your body. It can make a man believe he can fly. It can be like water to a man dying of thirst. It has the ability to keep both of you breathing when one’s breath is taken away by life’s ups and downs. In order for it to achieve these awe inspiring feats, a man must do his part to keep her heart beating for him. Because of her heart’s vital role in sustaining the relationship, if you play with her heart and it stops beating for you…it most certainly will result in the death of the relationship. In order for her heart to deliver this life-giving love to all of your cells, a love equally as strong must be pumped into every fiber of her being. That love must be capable of purifying the bad blood she has taken in throughout the day that took her breath away and bring pure love back to her heart. In this way it is a continuous cycle allowing reciprocal life-giving love to flow between the two of you sustaining the very life of your relationship.
Sanjo Jendayi (I Now Pronounce You Single & Happy)
It is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness. Nor can someone from a culture that condescends to nature easily escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless. Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere. The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.
Barry Lopez (Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays)
What is un-Greek in Christianity. The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods above them as masters and themselves below them as servants, as did the Jews. They saw, as it were, only the reflection of the most successful specimens of their own caste, that is, an ideal, not a contrast to their own nature. They felt related to them, there was a reciprocal interest, a kind of symmachia. Man thinks of himself as noble when he gives himself such gods, and puts himself into a relationship similar to that of the lesser nobility to the higher. Whereas the Italic peoples have a regular peasant religion, with continual fearfulness about evil and capricious powers and tormentors. Where the Olympian gods retreated, there Greek life too grew gloomier and more fearful. Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely, and submerged him as if in deep mire. Then, all at once, into his feeling of complete confusion, it allowed the light of divine compassion to shine, so that the surprised man, stunned by mercy, let out a cry of rapture, and thought for a moment that he carried all of heaven within him. All psychological inventions of Christianity work toward this sick excess of feeling, toward the deep corruption of head and heart necessary for it. Christianity wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate: there is only one thing it does not want: moderation, and for this reason, it is in its deepest meaning barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Greek.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits)
While limerence has been called love, it is not love. Although the limerent feels a kind of love for LO at the time, from LO’s point of view limerence and love are quite different from each other. It is limerence, not love, that increases when lovers are able to meet only infrequently or when there is anger between them. No wonder those who view limerence from an external vantage are baffled by what seems more a form of insanity than a form of love. Jean-Paul Sartre calls it a project with a “contradictory ideal.” He notes that each of the lovers seek the love of the other without realizing that what they want is to be loved. His conclusion is that the amorous relation is “a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror game which carries within itself its own frustration,” a kind of “dupery.” It should also be clear now that limerent uncertainly as well as projection can be viewed as the consequence of your limerent inclination to hide your own feelings: If you hide your true reactions, then LO, if indeed limerent, can be expected to do the same. When LO appears not to be eager, or even interested, it is not unreasonable to interpret that behavior as evidence itself of limerence; and a kind of “paranoia” becomes an entirely logical consequence of a situation that may indeed be what Simone de Beauvoir has called it: “impossible.” Because one of the invariant characteristics of limerence is extreme emotional dependency on LO’s behavior, the actual course of the limerence must depend on the actions and reactions of both lovers. Uncertainty increases limerence; increased limerence dictates altered action which serves to increase or decrease limerence in the other according to the interpretation given. The interplay is delicate if the relationship hovers near mutuality; a subtle imbalance, constantly shifting, appears to maintain it. Each knows who “loves more.” If limerence were measurable by an instrument that enabled its intensity to be read by the points on a dial, one could imagine that, if lovers sat together reading each other’s degree of reciprocation, the dials would rarely if ever set themselves at the same point on the scales. For instance, if you found yourself more limerent than your partner, then your limerence might decline through reduced hope, or if your partner’s were higher, it might decline through reduced uncertainty. Perhaps such true awareness would provide a means of controlling the reaction.
Dorothy Tennov (Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love)
According to the book of Genesis, “God created man in his own image.” According to Aristotle, “men create the gods after their own image.” As should be clear by now, Aristotle seems to have been onto something, especially when it comes to the minds of gods. So, in theory, some of the more basic features of the human mind should be fairly standard equipment in gods, especially the gods of “primitive” religions. That seems to be the case, and one of these features deserves special consideration: the part of the human mind shaped by the evolutionary dynamic known as “reciprocal altruism.” In light of this dynamic, much about the origin of religion, and for that matter much about contemporary religion, makes a new kind of sense. Thanks to reciprocal altruism, people are “designed” to settle into mutually beneficial relationships with other people, people whom they can count on for things ranging from food to valuable gossip to social support, and who in turn can count on them. We enter these alliances almost without thinking about it, because our genetically based emotions draw us in. We feel gratitude for a favor received, along with a sense of obligation, which may lead us to return the favor. We feel growing trust of and affection for people who prove reliable reciprocators (aka “friends”), which keeps us entwined in beneficial relationships. This is what feelings like gratitude and trust are for—the reason they’re part of human nature. But of course, not everyone merits our trust. Some people accept our gifts of food and never reciprocate, or try to steal our mates, or exhibit disrespect in some other fashion. And if we let people thus take advantage of us day after day, the losses add up. In the environment of our evolution, these losses could have made the difference between surviving and not surviving, between prolifically procreating and barely procreating. So natural selection gave us emotions that lead us to punish the untrustworthy—people who violate our expectations of exchange, people who seem to lack the respect that a mutually beneficial relationship demands. They fill us with outrage, with moral indignation, and that outrage—working as “designed” —impels us to punish them in one way or another, whether by actually harming them or just by withholding future altruism. That will teach them! (Perhaps more important, it will also teach anyone else who is watching, and in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, pretty much everyone in your social universe was watching.) This is the social context in which the human mind evolved: a world full of neighbors who, to varying degrees, are watching you for signs of betrayal or disrespect or dishonesty—and who, should they see strong evidence of such things, will punish you. In such a social universe, when misfortune comes your way, when someone hits you or ridicules you or suddenly gives you the cold shoulder, there’s a good chance it’s because they feel you’ve violated the rules of exchange. Maybe you’ve failed to do them some favor they think they were due, or maybe you’ve shown them disrespect by doing something that annoys them. Surely it is no coincidence that this generic explanation of why misfortune might emanate from a human being is also the generic explanation of why misfortune emanates from gods. In hunter-gatherer religions—and lots of other religions—when bad things happen, the root cause is almost always that people in one sense or another fail to respect the gods. They either fail to give gods their due (fail, say, to make adequate sacrifices to ancestral spirits), or they do things that annoy gods (like, say, making a noise while cicadas are singing). And the way to make amends to the aggrieved gods is exactly the way you’d make amends to aggrieved people: either give them something (hence ritual sacrifice), or correct future behavior so that it doesn’t annoy them (quit making noises while cicadas are singing).
Robert Wright (The Evolution of God)
Determining the proper relationship between universal morality and historically particular ethics poses a particularly acute problem in the postmodern era. The question that has remained with us since the end of World War II is how to overcome the paralysis of Auschwitz – how to acknowledge the necessary deferral of reciprocity without condoning genocide. If we hold history’s institutions to the touchstone of the moral model, they will always be found wanting, yet this historical experience tells us that if we do not so hold them, anything is possible. The fact that accusations of Nazism (or “fascism”) continue to be made today – notably against Israel itself – is a sign that the moral dilemma hos not yet been resolved. But unlike metaphysical thought, originary thinking takes the Holocaust as sign not of the need to construct a social model that will resolve this dilemma, but of the inapproapriateness of confronting it directly. Making the world a better place not only does not require but is in fact incompatible with a prior image of the world made good.
Eric Gans
highlight people’s faith, God’s faithfulness and/or Christ’s faithfulness? Later chapters will touch on these topics further. Without diving deep into them here, I suggest a possible way forward. In honor-shame contexts, the practice of patronage and a stress on reciprocity are frequently present. Scores of books and articles have noted the importance of patronage in the ancient world and its potential influence on the Bible, including Romans.11 Within patron-client relationships, a basic obligation
Jackson Wu (Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes: Honor and Shame in Paul's Message and Mission)
What is love" was the most searched phrase on Google in 2012, according to the company. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the question once and for all, the Guardian has gathered writers from the fields of science, literature, religion and philosophy to give their definition of the much-pondered word. 카톡 ☎ ppt33 ☎ 〓 라인 ☎ pxp32 ☎ 홈피는 친추로 연락주세요 The physicist: 'Love is chemistry' Biologically, love is a powerful neurological condition like hunger or thirst, only more permanent. We talk about love being blind or unconditional, in the sense that we have no control over it. But then, that is not so surprising since love is basically chemistry. While lust is a temporary passionate sexual desire involving the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and oestrogen, in true love, or attachment and bonding, the brain can release a whole set of chemicals: pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin and vasopressin. However, from an evolutionary perspective, love can be viewed as a survival tool – a mechanism we have evolved to promote long-term relationships, mutual defense and parental support of children and to promote feelings of safety and security. 요힘빈구입,요힘빈구매,요힘빈판매,요힘빈가격,요힘빈파는곳,요힘빈구입방법,요힘빈구매방법,요힘빈복용법,요힘빈부작용,요힘빈정품구입,요힘빈정품구매,요힘빈정품판매 Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. 아무런 말없이 한번만 찾아주신다면 뒤로는 계속 단골될 그런 자신 있습니다.저희쪽 서비스가 아니라 제품에대해서 자신있다는겁니다 팔팔정,구구정,네노마정,프릴리지,비맥스,비그알엑스,엠빅스,비닉스,센트립 등 많은 제품 취급합니다 확실한 제품만 취급하는곳이라 언제든 연락주세요 Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here? The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me. I want to put a ding in the universe. Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is better than two doubles. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. The philosopher: 'Love is a passionate commitment' The answer remains elusive in part because love is not one thing. Love for parents, partners, children, country, neighbor, God and so on all have different qualities. Each has its variants – blind, one-sided, tragic, steadfast, fickle, reciprocated, misguided, and unconditional. At its best, however, all love is a kind a passionate commitment that we nurture and develop, even though it usually arrives in our lives unbidden. That's why it is more than just a powerful feeling. Without the commitment, it is mere infatuation. Without the passion, it is mere dedication. Without nurturing, even the best can wither and die. The romantic novelist: 'Love drives all great stories' What love is depends on where you are in relation to it. Secure in it, it can feel as mundane and necessary as air – you exist within it, almost unnoticing. Deprived of it, it can feel like an obsession; all consuming, a physical pain. Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country. It is the point before consummation of it that fascinates: what separates you from love, the obstacles that stand in its way. It is usually at those points that love is everything.
요;힘빈가격 cia2.co.to 카톡:ppt33 요힘빈후기 요힘빈구매방법,요힘빈복용법 요힘빈부작용 요힘빈효과
The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal. A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
God’s relationship to the church is not contractual; it’s covenantal. And what’s mind-blowing about God’s covenantal love toward the church is that God fulfills the obligations of both parties! God has put on my life the command that I am to love my wife, Lauren, as Christ loved the church. That is God’s command on my life—regardless of whether or not she reciprocates that love. I don’t love her as Christ loved the church in order to get something from her; I love her that way because that is what God has commanded me to do, and that’s the way he has loved me.
Matt Chandler (The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption)
Our ancestors always operated with a sense of being in a reciprocal emotional relationship with their physical surroundings. Whether they felt that they were being rewarded by Mother Nature or punished by her, at least they were engaged in a constant conversation with her.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Change needed: You want a more reciprocal relationship.
Nicole LePera (How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self)
Simonton’s study highlights the important reciprocity of directing your admiration toward others and receiving it from them, too. Even if you have no aspirations to become a famous artist, certain relationships of admiration might propel your endeavor forward and outward in ways you could not imagine. This small shift in perspective could have big ripples of impact.
Jeffrey Davis (Tracking Wonder: Reclaiming a Life of Meaning and Possibility in a World Obsessed with Productivity)
The theme, then, that will be with us throughout this study is the reciprocal relationship of God’s transcendence and God’s immanence;
Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor (Communio Books))
In contrast, engaging in a real relationship means being open and establishing emotional reciprocity. If you try this with emotionally immature people, you’ll feel frustrated and invalidated. As soon as you start looking for emotional understanding from such people, you won’t be as balanced within yourself. It makes more sense to aim for simple relatedness with them, saving your relationship aspirations for people who can give something back.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
You agreed to a casual relationship knowing your feelings might never be reciprocated?” Disbelief colors her voice. “Yes.” “Why?” “Some people are worth the risk.
Lauren Asher (Love Redesigned (Lakefront Billionaires, #1))
If the outcome is not the outcome you want (profound reciprocity and readiness to take this thing to the next level), promise that you will strive to feel sadness, not shame. Grieve the fact that this person does not want what you want, but do not turn against yourself. Direct your disappointment toward the outcome, not toward you as a person.
Alexandra H. Solomon (Love Every Day: 365 Relational Self-Awareness Practices to Help Your Relationship Heal, Grow, and Thrive)
Indigenous people have always inherently respected and given back to the Earth. We are taught to walk with gratitude, reverence, and reciprocity in our relationships with the Plants, Trees, Waters, and Animals, yet we can also apply this to our relationships with other humans. I love the practice of blessing all things: people, relationships, challenging interactions, or situations included.
Asha Frost (You Are the Medicine)
There is a reciprocal relationship between politicians, government officials and intellectuals, whether in formal institutions or elsewhere. Politicians, especially on the left depend on intellectuals to give credibility to the ideologies that justify government overreach and leftwing policies. In return the intellectuals, including college professors are rewarded with taxpayer funded research grants, and other lucrative opportunities for personal gain.
Salatiso Lonwabo Mdeni (The Homeschooling Father, How and Why I got started.: Traditional Schooling to Online Learning until Homeschooling)
Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t. When this conversational balance becomes lopsided, social connections fray. To make matters worse, when this occurs, the people who are overventing and inadvertently alienating those around them are less capable of solving problems. This makes it harder for them to fix the breach in their relationships, begetting a vicious cycle that can end with a toxic outcome: loneliness and isolation.
Ethan Kross (Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It)
We are not transmitting or receiving love as we were divinely intended to—we are filtering love rather than feeling it. We fell for the prevailing hysteria that said, “Protect your heart,” and we began to believe that love itself had enemies and needed protecting. When we were hurt, we felt that love was somehow diminished or damaged. But hurt has nothing to do with love, and love is unaffiliated with and unaffected by pain. Ego was hurt, not love. Love is divine; it is everywhere, ever present and abundant and free. It is a spiritual energy that is, at this very moment, flowing through the universe—through us, through our enemies, through our families, through billions of souls. It was never absent from our lives. It is not bound in our hearts or in our relationships, and thus it is not capable of being owned or lost. We have allowed our awareness of love to diminish; that is all. In doing so, we have caused our own suffering. We must mature and realize that freeing our mind of ancient hurts and opening once more to love shall give us access to divine strength. To stand emotionally open before the world and give of our hearts without fear of hurt or demand of reciprocity—this is the ultimate act of human courage.
Brendon Burchard (The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power)
Knowledge is not an encounter between two separate things - a knowing subject and a known object. Knowledge, or better, knowing is a relationship in which knower and known are like the poles in a magnetic field. Human beings are aware of a world because, and only because, it is the sort of world that breeds knowing organisms. Humanity is not one thing and the world another; it has always been difficult for us to see that any organism is r so embedded in its environment that the evolution of so complex and intelligent a creature as man could never have come to pass without a reciprocal evolution of the environ­ment. An intelligent man argues, without any resort to supernaturalism, an intelligent universe.
Alan W. Watts (The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity)
Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t.
Ethan Kross (Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It)
One overlooked aspect of the matriarchal image is the relationship with other matriarchs or mothers who are the heads of households. Mother-to-mother dependence is another element of African American motherhood. Whereas these women work hard for the money outside of the home, they also lean on each other to share childcare responsibilities. The concept of “other mothering” is a component in the African American maternal tradition. Women taking care of each other’s children helped to establish a form of extended family. If formal childcare is not available or too costly, one mother substitutes for another. Other mothering means that the level of respect and honor a child gives to her or his biological mother is due the neighbor, cousin, aunt, or family friend taking care of the child. In the same vein, this secondary mother has the right to discipline the “son” or “daughter” as she would her own. Such reciprocity promotes a sense of communal responsibility that cross-connects mothers and children. If a child misbehaves, it is not unusual to suffer the wrath of both a community and a biological mother. Although this level of motherly accountability may not be as prevalent today, in some communities African American women still depend on each other to pick up children before and after school, carpool to a practice or game, provide a meal here and there, and just serve as an additional family member and supporter.
Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder (When Momma Speaks: The Bible and Motherhood from a Womanist Perspective)
With limitless and expectationless determination genuine love is bound to be reciprocated.
Abhijit Naskar (Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction)
But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really the consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man's intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.
Karl Marx (Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)
All theory is at the same time a practice...The link between theory and practice is not one of linear dependency. It is a circular relationship where envelopment is reciprocal.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952 (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))