Reverse Psychology Quotes

In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life.

In the mantra of shared hatred and placing the blame on Israel, our cowardice to face the barbarity of our heads of states was replaced with a divine purpose. Contemplating the manifestation of the eradication of hatred I often concluded, the entirety of the Middle East’s theocracies and dictatorships would be replaced by total anarchy. We would be left with nothing, as our brotherhood of hatred was the only bond known to us. Enculturated in the malarkey of that demagoguery, forces beyond our control and comprehension seem to deceive us into a less harmful and satisfactory logic as opposed to placing some blame on ourselves and thus, having to act to reverse that state of affairs.

Positive thinking is powerful thinking. If you want happiness, fulfillment, success and inner peace, start thinking you have the power to achieve those things. Focus on the bright side of life and expect positive results.

Skylar todl you to come here?" I asked dumbly. "No," Bethany said. "Skylar told me not to come here. Same dif.

Reverse psychology, I do it in front of the mirror.

We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk—always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it.

At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effects of chronic stress; it can also reverse them. Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to its preshriveled state. The mechanisms by which exercise changes how we think and feel are so much more effective than donuts, medicines, and wine. When you say you feel less stressed out after you go for a swim, or even a fast walk, you are.

Reverse your thinking. Positivity is psychologically rewarding.

So, if we win, we get a chance to die sooner?' Rhiannon whispers. 'Maybe they're trying a reverse psychology thing.

A man walks into a library and says, ‘I hope you don’t have a book on reverse psychology.

A fundamental approach to life transformation is using social media for therapy; it forces you to have an opinion, provides intellectual stimulation, increases awareness, boosts self-confidence, and offers the possibility of hope.

A handful of experiences when I was small have made me a confirmed nonathlete. In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life.” — Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and other concerns)

The challenge is to explain, without resorting to the all-too-easy concept of evil, how people are capable of causing extreme hurt to one another. So let’s substitute the term “evil” with the term “empathy erosion.” Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect. In theory these are transient emotions, the empathy erosion reversible. But empathy erosion can be the result of more permanent psychological characteristics.

If there is any hope for changing the world for the better, from reducing family violence to reversing overpopulation and international conflict, economists, educators, and political leaders will need to base their interventions on a sound understanding of what people are really like, not on some fairy-tale version of what we would like them to be.

If you believe all those who are urging you to give up are wrong, prove them wrong!

The surest way to get a bunch of queers to do anything is to make a rule nonsensically forbidding us from doing it.

That’s some reverse psychology Mean Girls shit right there.” Knight points at me with a piece of carrot and pops it into his mouth. Via gazes at him under her lashes, all doe-eyed and ready to charm his pants off. “And you are?” “Not interested,” he deadpans. I smile inwardly, bursting with happiness. Knight is loyal to a fault. Vaughn, too. Rumor has it, when she smiled at her in the hallway earlier, he breezed past her, and drawled, “You haven’t earned the right to talk to me yet. Try again in two months.

Research has demonstrated that severe and long-lasting stress, as well as depression and anger, cause the body to produce chemicals which block healing (both psychological and physical) and even reduce life expectancy.

In his attempt to graft my attributes onto his own belief system, one just would not take: my rabid feminism, which for me was the idea that no kind of sex is shameful and any kind of violence (including psychological, including societal mores) is. This is the unspoken reverse of American thinking in general, and of rich men in particular. I am often inappropriate.

If you come right out and say it, people think you won’t do it. Some reverse psychology bullshit.

We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk -- always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part -- there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it.

What is the Conscious leap? Conscious leap is a term that refers to a process of change. It specifies a particular point in the process where a change cannot be undone or reversed. The leap is the singularity point ,the point of no return. It will be a fundamental change in everybody's way of living. Not everybody will remain alive during this turbulent phase. Thought of the Day

Since zombies are slower than humans, your family should be able to calmly turn around and walk away from danger. That’s the theory. In practice, executing even the simplest maneuver with kids is virtually impossible. They naturally do the opposite of what you tell them, unless they anticipated you’d use reverse psychology. Then they do the opposite of whatever you said. If you understood those sentences at all, you’ve already spent too much time with your children.

A response is thus a particular case of interaction between the external world and the subject, but unlike physiological interactions, which are of a material nature and involve an internal change in the bodies which are present, the responses studied by psychology are of a functional nature and are achieved at greater and greater distances in space (perception, etc.) and in time (memory, etc.) besides following more and more complex paths (reversals, detours, etc.).

Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he contributes constructively to its development or does the reverse. Community, on the contrary, implies one's relating one's self to others affirmatively and responsibly. Community in the economic sense implies an emphasis on the social values and functions of work. Community in the psychological sense involves the individual's relating himself to others in love as well as creativity.

In movies, they use exaggeration to stimulate your mind, Reverse is also true, When your mind is stimulated (by a sad or happy event), you start exaggerating things. Your problem is not as big as your mind makes you believe. To get real perspective, go out, take a walk. observe life around you.

Negative prophecies are reversible. The Lord reveals to conquer. You are created to reverse any negative with your prayers and the word of God.

Wonders Does Psychology Reverse.

4. Psychological contrast was sometimes effective: sudden reversals of tone, for example.

I have found the PROBLEM to the SOLUTION.

Modern Christianity, in dramatic reversal of its biblical form, promises to relieve the pain of living in a fallen world. Then message, whether it’s from fundamentalists requiring us to live by a favored set of rules or from charismatics urging a deeper surrender to the Spirit’s power, is too often the same: The promise of bliss is for now! Complete satisfaction can be ours this side of heaven. Some speak of the joys of fellowship and obedience, others of a rich awareness of their value and worth. The language may be reassuringly biblical or it may reflect the influence of current psychological thought. Either way, the point of living the Christian life has shifted from knowing and serving Christ till He returns to soothing, or at least learning to ignore, the ache in our soul.

Itchy?” “I’m not sure. It’s hard to concentrate on feeling bad when you’re feeling me up.” His lips curl at the corners. “Are you saying I’ve got magic hands, like Jesus?” “Are you saying I’m a leper?” He tugs the edge of my shirt back into place. “Totally. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Please stay away from me and definitely don’t kiss me.” “Got it.” “That was supposed to be reverse psychology.

Want to know if someone is lying or betraying your trust? Notice that during a conversation the person has these four attitudes: he leans on his hand, he leans on his face, he crosses his arms and he maintains a posture that is tilted somewhere, not erect.

Criminal profiling is the writing process in reverse. Writers create characters and project their actions forwards into a timeline. Profilers are left with the aftermath of an offender's behaviour and must extrapolate backwards to establish their characteristics.

The ambivalent strategy involves clinging to the care-giver, often with excessive submissiveness, or adopting a role-reversal in which the care-giver is cared for rather than vice versa. Here feelings of anger at the rejection are most conspicuously subjected to defensive exclusion. Although these strategies have the function of maintaining attachment in the face of difficulties, a price has to be paid. The attachment patterns so established are clearly restricted and, if repeated in all relationships, will be maladaptive.

I have long stressed the Hegelian procedure at work in this reversal of positions of the beautiful soul in relation to the reality he accuses. The point is not to adapt him to it, but to show him that he is only too well adapted to it, since he assists in its very fabrication.

For the first few hundred years of American history, food preparation was generally approached in a no-nonsense manner. Even as late as twenty-five years ago, the general attitude was that “feeding your face” was all right, but to make too much fuss about it was somehow decadent. In the past two decades, of course, the trend has reversed itself so sharply that earlier misgivings about gastronomic excesses seem almost to have been justified. Now we have “foodies” and wine freaks who take the pleasures of the palate as seriously as if they were rites in a brand-new religion. Gourmet

The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no one inside and no one outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is a world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me. No, the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. "Lost in oneself" is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are." ―from_Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious_

Anatomy is destiny, and it is indeed grim destiny that a man who wishes to impose his will on a woman often has the means of physical force available to him. The same is not generally true in reverse. This biological fact of nature is not fair. But there is no fairness in nature. There is only nature in nature.

Have you made a choice in your past which was right at the time, but once you had a chance to think about it, you wished you could reverse your decision or amend it? Rethinking gives you permission to use your thoughts to change your mind. Take what is and spin it around to give you a new review and fresh perspective.

I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It's as if I'm standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float as a gauzy sheet stretching over to the left. I also see people, architecture and events laid out chronologically in the columns. When I think of the year 1805, I see Trafalgar, women in the clothes of that era, famous people who lived then, the building, etc. The sixth to tenth centuries are very green, the Middle Ages are dark with vibrant splashes of red and blue and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are brown with rich, lush colours in the furniture and clothing.

When situation around you changes, you also change so as to adapt. The reverse is also true. When you change, the situation around you changes. But you don't want to change yourself. You only want to change your clothes, mobile and other things on the surface. You resist changes required in your core self because you strongly identify with it.

Many of the writers at the time were immersed not only in a contemporary fascination with esoteric and psychological themes but also reached farther back into pagan times for philosophical inspiration. Fowles wrote, We often forget to what an extent the Renaissance and all its achievements sprang from a reversion to the Greek system. The relationship between paganism and freedom of thought is too well established to need any proof; and all monotheistic religions are in a sense puritan in tone—inherently tyrannical and fascistic. The great scientific triumphs of the Greeks, their logic, their democracy, their arts, all were made possible by their loose, fluid concepts of divinity; and the same is true of the most recent hundred years of human history.2

How do we learn? Is there a better way? What can we predict? Can we trust what we’ve learned? Rival schools of thought within machine learning have very different answers to these questions. The main ones are five in number, and we’ll devote a chapter to each. Symbolists view learning as the inverse of deduction and take ideas from philosophy, psychology, and logic. Connectionists reverse engineer the brain and are inspired by neuroscience and physics. Evolutionaries simulate evolution on the computer and draw on genetics and evolutionary biology. Bayesians believe learning is a form of probabilistic inference and have their roots in statistics. Analogizers learn by extrapolating from similarity judgments and are influenced by psychology and mathematical optimization.

Speculation was now news. News had been confused with fact. Fact had been replaced by expert opinion. People had been replaced by their biographies. Ability had been replaced by disability. Thinking had been replaced by psychology. History had been reduced to story. And while the news media pumped out a new story every week on things that could kill you, Hollywood simultaneously created stories that showed that everything could be prevailed over. Meaning, he said, was so malleable that it could be turned inside out, and no one would know the difference—and it would—and, just like the universe that had expanded to its maximum size, everything that had ever been would happen in reverse and revert back to its original form until existence would disappear without leaving a trace of itself as the Big Bang backfired.

[A] new finding shows that while in the 1940s, three-quarters of those surveyed claimed to dream in black and white, today, three-quarters say the opposite, that they dream in color. This reversal is attributed to a change in the number of people who grew up watching color rather than black and white television... another hint that our private dreams are intimately linked to our collective mediated experiences.

We are victims of the psychological condition of derealisation, a loss of the sense of reality of what is happening. Our contemporaries have persuaded themselves that ‘catastrophe cannot happen’ and that this civilisation is at the same time eternal and continually getting better and better, that it will never experience a reversal, and a fortiori not a collapse. Not only is this a possibility, but it will happen, and very soon.

If depression, loneliness, and social anxiety maintain themselves through a vicious circle of negative experiences, negative thinking, and self-defeating behavior, it should be possible to break the circle at any of several points—by changing the environment, by training the person to behave more constructively, or by reversing negative thinking. And it is. Several therapy methods help free people from depression’s vicious circle.

The problem is most people don’t really think prayer makes a difference in how God acts. The majority of us are fatalistic when it comes to prayer. Lots of people honestly believe that what’s going to happen is going to happen, with or without prayer. That kind of a twisted, lazy theology is what sucks the life out of people’s prayers.[13] Are you saying my prayers really make a difference in what God does or does not do? Yes. Do not miss that. Many Jesus followers do. What I’m saying is really important. Prayer changes reality. Prayer moves the hand of God. Dallas Willard writes: “God’s response to our prayers is not a charade. He does not pretend that he is answering our prayer when he is only doing what he was going to do anyway. Our requests really do make a difference in what God does or does not do. The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best…of course this is not the biblical idea of prayer, nor is it the idea of people for whom prayer is a vital part of life.”[14] When you pray, things happen. And the reverse is also true. When you don’t pray, things don’t happen. It is written, “You have not because you ask not.” Do you know what that really means? You have not because you ask not![15] What a novel idea. I repeat: Prayer changes reality. Prayer moves the hand of God.

There’s a concept in psychology called “decision fatigue” that marketers use to exploit consumers. It appears humans have a limited capacity to make many decisions in one short stretch of time, and the quality of our decisions will deteriorate to the extent that we eventually begin making downright irrational choices. Ever wonder why supermarkets stack the junk food at the checkout counter? After wading through the forty thousand items in the average supermarket,46 we end up with less willpower to resist impulse purchases.

Breaking free is only the beginning. Then begins the painful process of reversing the indoctrination. The longer someone stays in a cult the harder it is for them to remember who they were before the cult took control of their mind. Or in the case of someone like me, a cult-born child, my entire personality was made and created by them. When I left I had no idea who I was. My whole existence, everything I thought I knew, had been a lie. But it is the psychological aftermath of life in a cult that is all too often the silent killer.

Yet this simple situation suffices to demonstrate that even that universally decried thing, which would nowhere find anyone to defend it, “gossip,” has, whether we are ourselves its object, so that it then becomes particularly disagreeable, or whether it teaches us something we did not know about a third person, its psychological value. It prevents the mind from falling asleep over the factitious view that it takes of what it believes things to be like, which is only their outward appearance. It turns this inside out with the magical dexterity of an idealist philosopher and quickly offers us an unsuspected corner of the reverse side of the fabric.

The Jungian doctrine of the shadow and the notion that evil is the reverse of good are aimed at denying the reality of evil. But evil is real. It is not innate but acquired, and it is never the reverse of good but rather its destroyer. Shakespeare was aware of this. He saw and showed the origins of evil but never tried to relativize evil by using psychological explanations, as is done in psychoanalysis, for instance. Richard III, Macbeth, and some of his other characters are evil because they are destructive, even when we know why they have become so. Our knowledge cannot alter them. They can change only if they sense, not merely intellectually but with their feelings, how they have been turned into evil people.

It seems paradoxical that an organization responsible for enforcing the law would frequently rely on illegal practices. The police resolve this tension between nominally lawful ends and illegal means by substituting their own occupational and organizational norms for the legal duties assigned to them. Westley suggests: This process then results in a transfer in property from the state to the colleague group. The means of violence which were originally a property of the state, in loan to its law-enforcement agent, the police, are in a psychological sense confiscated by the police, to be conceived of as a personal property to be used at their discretion. From the officers’ perspective, the center of authority is shifted and the relationship between the state and its agents is reversed. The police become a law unto themselves.

The conflict between the two dimensions of consciousness is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is also why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity. We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself. It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by means of the “mind,” even though the mind asserts that it is not dependent on the psyche. How could it prove that? We can say, if we like, that one statement comes from the psyche, is psychic and nothing but psychic, and that another comes from the mind, is “spiritual” and therefore superior to the psychic one. Both are mere assertions based on the postulates of belief.

Thus, besides the will, which is entirely dependent on its content, man has a further auxiliary in the unconscious, that maternal womb of creative fantasy, which is able at any time to fashion symbols in the natural process of elementary psychic activity, symbols that can serve to determine the mediating will. I say “can” advisedly, because the symbol does not of its own accord step into the breach, but remains in the unconscious just so long as the energic value of the conscious contents exceeds that of the unconscious symbol. Under normal conditions this is always the case; but under abnormal conditions a reversal of value sets in, whereby the unconscious acquires a higher value than the conscious. The symbol then rises to the surface without, however, being taken up by the will and the executive conscious functions, since these, on account of the reversal of value, have now become subliminal. The unconscious, on the other hand, has become supraliminal, and an abnormal state, a psychic disturbance, has supervened.

In the car ahead, Jane was thinking fast and furiously. She had felt the purpose for which Tarzan had asked a few words with her, and she knew that she must be prepared to give him an answer in the very near future. He was not the sort of person one could put off, and somehow that very thought made her wonder if she did not really fear him. And could she love where she feared? She realized the spell that had been upon her in the depths of that far-off jungle, but there was no spell of enchantment now in prosaic Wisconsin. Nor did the immaculate young Frenchman appeal to the primal woman in her, as had the stalwart forest god. Did she love him? She did not know—now. She glanced at Clayton out of the corner of her eye. Was not here a man trained in the same school of environment in which she had been trained—a man with social position and culture such as she had been taught to consider as the prime essentials to congenial association? Did not her best judgment point to this young English nobleman, whose love she knew to be of the sort a civilized woman should crave, as the logical mate for such as herself? Could she love Clayton? She could see no reason why she could not. Jane was not coldly calculating by nature, but training, environment and heredity had all combined to teach her to reason even in matters of the heart. That she had been carried off her feet by the strength of the young giant when his great arms were about her in the distant African forest, and again today, in the Wisconsin woods, seemed to her only attributable to a temporary mental reversion to type on her part—to the psychological appeal of the primeval man to the primeval woman in her nature. If he should never touch her again, she reasoned, she would never feel attracted toward him. She had not loved him, then. It had been nothing more than a passing hallucination, super-induced by excitement and by personal contact. Excitement would not always mark their future relations, should she marry him, and the power of personal contact eventually would be dulled by familiarity. Again she glanced at Clayton. He was very handsome and every inch a gentleman. She should be very proud of such a husband.

A further result of the abstracting attitude of consciousness, and one whose significance will become more apparent in the course of our exposition, is that the unconscious develops a compensating attitude. For the more the relation to the object is restricted by abstraction (because too many “experiences” and “laws” are made), the more insistently does a craving for the object develop in the unconscious, and this finally expresses itself in consciousness as a compulsive sensuous tie to the object. The sensuous relation to the object then takes the place of a feeling relation, which is lacking, or rather suppressed, because of abstraction. Characteristically, therefore, Schiller regards the senses, and not feelings, as the way to divinity. His ego makes use of thinking, but his affections, his feelings, make use of sensation. Thus for him the schism is between spirituality in the form of thinking, and sensuousness in the form of affectivity or feeling. For the extravert the situation is reversed: his relation to the object is highly developed, but his world of ideas is sensory and concrete.

Reversive blockade: Emphatically insisting upon something which is the opposite of the truth blocks the average person’s mind from perceiving the truth. In accordance with the dictates of healthy common sense, he starts searching for meaning in the “golden mean” between the truth and its opposite, winding up with some satisfactory counterfeit. People who think like this do not realize that this effect is precisely the intent of the person who subjects them to this method. If the counterfeit of the truth is the opposite of a moral truth, at the same time, it simultaneously represents an extreme paramoralism, and bears its peculiar suggestiveness. We rarely see this method being used by normal people; even if raised by the people who abused it; they usually only indicate its results in their characteristic difficulties in apprehending reality properly. Use of this method can be included within the above-mentioned special psychological knowledge developed by psychopaths concerning the weaknesses of human nature and the art of leading others into error. Where they are in rule, this method is used with virtuosity, and to an extent conterminous with their power.

Now to picture the mechanism of this process of construction and not merely its progressive extension, we must note that each level is characterized by a new co-ordination of the elements provided—already existing in the form of wholes, though of a lower order—by the processes of the previous level. The sensori-motor schema, the characteristic unit of the system of pre-symbolic intelligence, thus assimilates perceptual schemata and the schemata relating to learned action (these schemata of perception and habit being of the same lower order, since the first concerns the present state of the object and the second only elementary changes of state). The symbolic schema assimilates sensori-motor schemata with differentiation of function; imitative accommodation is extended into imaginal significants and assimilation determines the significates. The intuitive schema is both a co-ordination and a differentiation of imaginal schemata. The concrete operational schema is a grouping of intuitive schemata, which are promoted, by the very fact of their being grouped, to the rank of reversible operations. Finally, the formal schema is simply a system of second-degree operations, and therefore a grouping operating on concrete groupings. Each of the transitions from one of these levels to the next is therefore characterized both by a new co-ordination and by a differentiation of the systems constituting the unit of the preceding level. Now these successive differentiations, in their turn, throw light on the undifferentiated nature of the initial mechanisms, and thus we can conceive both of a genealogy of operational groupings as progressive differentiations, and of an explanation of the pre-operational levels as a failure to differentiate the processes involved. Thus, as we have seen (Chap. 4), sensori-motor intelligence arrives at a kind of empirical grouping of bodily movements, characterized psychologically by actions capable of reversals and detours, and geometrically by what Poincaré called the (experimental) group of displacement. But it goes without saying that, at this elementary level, which precedes all thought, we cannot regard this grouping as an operational system, since it is a system of responses actually effected; the fact is therefore that it is undifferentiated, the displacements in question being at the same time and in every case responses directed towards a goal serving some practical purpose. We might therefore say that at this level spatio-temporal, logico-arithmetical and practical (means and ends) groupings form a global whole and that, in the absence of differentiation, this complex system is incapable of constituting an operational mechanism. At the end of this period and at the beginning of representative thought, on the other hand, the appearance of the symbol makes possible the first form of differentiation: practical groupings (means and ends) on the one hand, and representation on the other. But this latter is still undifferentiated, logico-arithmetical operations not being distinguished from spatio-temporal operations. In fact, at the intuitive level there are no genuine classes or relations because both are still spatial collections as well as spatio-temporal relationships: hence their intuitive and pre-operational character. At 7–8 years, however, the appearance of operational groupings is characterized precisely by a clear differentiation between logico-arithmetical operations that have become independent (classes, relations and despatialized numbers) and spatio-temporal or infra-logical operations. Lastly, the level of formal operations marks a final differentiation between operations tied to real action and hypothetico-deductive operations concerning pure implications from propositions stated as postulates.

Bowlby's conviction that attachment needs continue throughout life and are not outgrown has important implications for psychotherapy. It means that the therapist inevitably becomes an important attachment figure for the patient, and that this is not necessarily best seen as a 'regression' to infantile dependence (the developmental 'train' going into reverse), but rather the activation of attachment needs that have been previously suppressed. Heinz Kohut (1977) has based his 'self psychology' on a similar perspective. He describes 'selfobject needs' that continue from infancy throughout life and comprise an individual's need for empathic responsiveness from parents, friends, lovers, spouses (and therapists). This responsiveness brings a sense of aliveness and meaning, security and self-esteem to a person's existence. Its lack leads to narcissistic disturbances of personality characterised by the desperate search for selfobjects - for example, idealisation of the therapist or the development of an erotic transference. When, as they inevitably will, these prove inadequate (as did the original environment), the person responds with 'narcissistic rage' and disappointment, which, in the absence of an adequate 'selfobject' cannot be dealt with in a productive way.

In this very remarkable passage much is contained that we have already discussed. When the energy of positive thinking is supplied to feeling-sensation, which would amount to a reversal of the introverted thinking type, the qualities of undifferentiated, archaic feeling-sensation become paramount: the individual relapses into an extreme relatedness, or identity with the sensed object. This state is one of inferior extraversion, an extraversion which, as it were, detaches the individual entirely from his ego and dissolves him into archaic collective ties and identifications. He is then no longer “himself,” but sheer relatedness, identical with the object and therefore without a standpoint. The introvert instinctively feels the greatest resistance to this condition, which is no guarantee that he will not unconsciously fall into it. It should on no account be confused with the extraversion of the extraverted type, inclined as the introvert is to make this mistake and to display for this extraversion the same contempt which, at bottom, he always feels for his own.63 Schiller’s second instance, on the other hand, is the purest illustration of the introverted thinking type, who by amputating his inferior feeling-sensations condemns himself to sterility, to a state in which “humanity can reach him as little from without as from within.

Naturally, at first, one is inclined to regard such differences as mere individual idiosyncrasies. But anyone with the opportunity of gaining a fundamental knowledge of many men will soon discover that such a far-reaching contrast does not merely concern the individual case, but is a question of typical attitudes, with a universality far greater than a limited psychological experience would at first assume. In reality, as the preceding chapters will have shown, it is a question of a fundamental opposition; at times clear and at times obscure, but always emerging whenever we are dealing with individuals whose personality is in any way pronounced. Such men are found not only among the educated classes, but in every rank of society; with equal distinctness, therefore, our types can be demonstrated among labourers and peasants as among the most differentiated members of a nation. Furthermore, these types over-ride the distinctions of sex, since one finds the same contrasts amongst women of all classes. Such a universal distribution could hardly arise at the instigation of consciousness, ie. as the result of a conscious and deliberate choice of attitude. If this were the case, a definite level of society, linked together by a similar education and environment and, therefore, correspondingly localized, would surely have a majority representation of such an attitude. But the actual facts are just the reverse, for the types have, apparently, quite a random distribution. In the same family one child is introverted, and another extraverted.

Also bearing witness to the unbearable nature of the vulnerability experienced by peer-oriented kids is the preponderance of vulnerability-quelling drugs. Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. The older and more peer-oriented the kids, the more drugs seem to be an inherent part of their lifestyle. Peer orientation creates an appetite for anything that would reduce vulnerability. Drugs are emotional painkillers. And, in another way, they help young people escape from the benumbed state imposed by their defensive emotional detachment. With the shutdown of emotions come boredom and alienation. Drugs provide an artificial stimulation to the emotionally jaded. They heighten sensation and provide a false sense of engagement without incurring the risks of genuine openness. In fact, the same drug can play seemingly opposite functions in an individual. Alcohol and marijuana, for example, can numb or, on the other hand, free the brain and mind from social inhibitions. Other drugs are stimulants — cocaine, amphetamines, and ecstasy; the very name of the latter speaks volumes about exactly what is missing in the psychic life of our emotionally incapacitated young people. The psychological function served by these drugs is often overlooked by well-meaning adults who perceive the problem to be coming from outside the individual, through peer pressure and youth culture mores. It is not just a matter of getting our children to say no. The problem lies much deeper. As long as we do not confront and reverse peer orientation among our children, we are creating an insatiable appetite for these drugs. The affinity for vulnerability-reducing drugs originates from deep within the defended soul. Our children's emotional safety can come only from us: then they will not be driven to escape their feelings and to rely on the anesthetic effects of drugs. Their need to feel alive and excited can and should arise from within themselves, from their own innately limitless capacity to be engaged with the universe. This brings us back to the essential hierarchical nature of attachment. The more the child needs attachment to function, the more important it is that she attaches to those responsible for her. Only then can the vulnerability that is inherent in emotional attachment be endured. Children don't need friends, they need parents, grandparents, adults who will assume the responsibility to hold on to them. The more children are attached to caring adults, the more they are able to interact with peers without being overwhelmed by the vulnerability involved. The less peers matter, the more the vulnerability of peer relationships can be endured. It is exactly those children who don't need friends who are more capable of having friends without losing their ability to feel deeply and vulnerably. But why should we want our children to remain open to their own vulnerability? What is amiss when detachment freezes the emotions in order to protect the child?

The powerful influence of filmed examples in changing the behavior of children can be used as therapy for various problems. Some striking evidence is available in the research of psychologist Robert O’Connor on socially withdrawn preschool children. We have all seen children of this sort, terribly shy, standing alone at the fringes of the games and groupings of their peers. O’Connor worried that a long-term pattern of isolation was forming, even at an early age, that would create persistent difficulties in social comfort and adjustment through adulthood. In an attempt to reverse the pattern, O’Connor made a film containing eleven different scenes in a nursery-school setting. Each scene began by showing a different solitary child watching some ongoing social activity and then actively joining the activity, to everyone’s enjoyment. O’Connor selected a group of the most severely withdrawn children from four preschools and showed them his film. The impact was impressive. The isolates immediately began to interact with their peers at a level equal to that of the normal children in the schools. Even more astonishing was what O’Connor found when he returned to observe six weeks later. While the withdrawn children who had not seen O’Connor’s film remained as isolated as ever, those who had viewed it were now leading their schools in amount of social activity. It seems that this twenty-three-minute movie, viewed just once, was enough to reverse a potential pattern of lifelong maladaptive behavior. Such is the potency of the principle of social proof.50   When

Convergent intelligence focuses on one line of thought, ignoring the more complex “divergent” form of intelligence, which involves measuring differing factors. For example, during World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces asked scientists to devise a psychological exam that would measure a pilot’s intelligence and ability to handle difficult, unexpected situations. One question was: If you are shot down deep in enemy territory and must somehow make it back to friendly lines, what do you do? The results contradicted conventional thinking. Most psychologists expected that the air force study would show that pilots with high IQs would score highly on this test as well. Actually, the reverse was true. The pilots who scored highest were the ones with higher levels of divergent thinking, who could see through many different lines of thought. Pilots who excelled at this, for example, were able to think up a variety of unorthodox and imaginative methods to escape after they were captured behind enemy lines. The difference between convergent and divergent thinking is also reflected in studies on split-brain patients, which clearly show that each hemisphere of the brain is principally hardwired for one or the other. Dr. Ulrich Kraft of Fulda, Germany, writes, “The left hemisphere is responsible for convergent thinking and the right hemisphere for divergent thinking. The left side examines details and processes them logically and analytically but lacks a sense of overriding, abstract connections. The right side is more imaginative and intuitive and tends to work holistically, integrating pieces of an informational puzzle into a whole.” In this book, I take the position that human consciousness involves the ability to create a model of the world and then simulate the model into the future, in order to attain a goal.

Pagans were not impressed by the torture of Christians merely because it showed that they honestly held their opinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts of opinions. The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle. It is that it gives an appearance of a man having something quite specially strong to back him up, of his drawing upon some power. And this can only be proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed; when all the current of his bodily being is reversed and turned to pain. If a man is seen to be roaring with laughter all the time that he is skinned alive, it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere in the recesses of his mind he had thought of a rather good joke. Similarly, if men smiled and sang (as they did) while they were being boiled or torn in pieces, the spectators felt the presence of something more than mere mental honesty: they felt the presence of some new and unintelligible kind of pleasure, which, presumably, came from somewhere. It might be a strength of madness, or a lying spirit from Hell; but it was something quite positive and extraordinary; as positive as brandy and as extraordinary as conjuring. The Pagan said to himself: "If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the street?" The Secularists laboriously explain that martyrdoms do not prove a faith to be true, as if anybody was ever such a fool as to suppose that they did. What they did prove, or, rather, strongly suggest, was that something had entered human psychology which was stronger than strong pain. If a young girl, scourged and bleeding to death, saw nothing but a crown descending on her from God, the first mental step was not that her philosophy was correct, but that she was certainly feeding on something.

Spellbinders are characterized by pathological egotism. Such a person is forced by some internal causes to make an early choice between two possibilities: the first is forcing other people to think and experience things in a manner similar to his own; the second is a feeling of being lonely and different, a pathological misfit in social life. Sometimes the choice is either snake-charming or suicide. Triumphant repression of selfcritical or unpleasant concepts from the field of consciousness gradually gives rise to the phenomena of conversive thinking (twisted thinking), or paralogistics (twisted logic), paramoralisms (twisted morality), and the use of reversion blockades (Big Lies). They stream so profusely from the mind and mouth of the spellbinder that they flood the average person’s mind. Everything becomes subordinated to the spellbinder’s over-compensatory conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology emerges from this conviction, true in part, whose value is supposedly superior. However, if we analyze the exact functions of such an ideology in the spellbinder’s personality, we perceive that it is nothing other than a means of self-charming, useful for repressing those tormenting selfcritical associations into the subconscious. The ideology’s instrumental role in influencing other people also serves the spellbinder’s needs. The spellbinder believes that he will always find converts to his ideology, and most often, they are right. However, they feel shock (or even paramoral indignation) when it turns out that their influence extends to only a limited minority, while most people’s attitude to their activities remains critical, pained and disturbed. The spellbinder is thus confronted with a choice: either withdraw back into his void or strengthen his position by improving the ef ectiveness of his activities. The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who has succumbed to his influence and incorporated the experiential method he imposes. He showers such people with attention and property, if possible. Critics are met with “moral” outrage. It can even be proclaimed that the compliant minority is in fact the moral majority, since it professes the best ideology and honors a leader whose qualities are above average. Such activity is always necessarily characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically. However, spellbinders nurture great optimism and harbor visions of future triumphs similar to those they enjoyed over their own crippled souls. It is also possible for optimism to be a pathological symptom. In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively upon common sense and social order; such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers sometimes manifesting pathological traits, spellbinders’ activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy. Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally join together in a ponerogenic union. On the other hand, people who have maintained their healthy critical faculties intact, based upon their own common sense and moral criteria, attempt to counteract the spellbinders’ activities and their results. In the resulting polarization of social attitudes, each side justifies itself by means of moral categories. That is why such commonsense resistance is always accompanied by some feeling of helplessness and deficiency of criteria.

We receive a fatal imprint in childhood, at the time of our greatest plasticity, of our passive impressionism, of our helplessness before suggestion. In no period has the role of the parents loomed as immense, because we have recognized the determinism, but at the same time an exaggeration in the size of the Enormous Parent does not need to be permanent and irretrievable. The time has come when, having completed the scientific study of the importance of parents, we now must re-establish our power to revoke their imprint, to reverse our patterns, to kill our fatal downward tendencies. We do not remain smaller in suture than our parents. Nature had intended them to shrink progressively in our eyes to human proportions while we reach for our own maturity. Their fallibilities, their errors, their weaknesses were intended to develop our own capacity for parenthood. We were to discover their human weakness not to overwhelm or humiliate them, but to realize the difficulty of their task and awaken our own human protectiveness toward their failures or a respect for their partial achievement. But to place all responsibilities upon them is wrong too. If they gave us handicaps, they also gave us their courage, their obstinacy, their sacrifices, their moments of strength. We cannot forever await from them the sanction to mature, to impose on them our own truths, to resist or perhaps defeat them in our necessity to gain strength. We cannot always place responsibility outside of ourselves, on parents, nations, the world, society, race, religion. Long ago it was the gods. If we accepted a part of this responsibility we would simultaneously discover our strength. A handicap is not permanent. We are permitted all the fluctuations, metamorphoses which we all so well understand in our scientific studies of psychology. Character has ceased to be a mystery and we can no longer refuse our responsibility with the excuse that this is an unformed, chaotic, eyeless, unpredictable force which drives, tosses, breaks us at will.

Thus polyvictimization or complex trauma are "developmentally adverse interpersonal traumas" (Ford, 2005) because they place the victim at risk not only for recurrent stress and psychophysiological arousal (e.g., PTSD, other anxiety disorders, depression) but also for interruptions and breakdowns in healthy psychobiological, psychological, and social development. Complex trauma not only involves shock, fear, terror, or powerlessness (either short or long term) but also, more fundamentally, constitutes a violation of the immature self and the challenge to the development of a positive and secure self, as major psychic energy is directed toward survival and defense rather than toward learning and personal development (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). Moreover, it may influence the brain's very development, structure, and functioning in both the short and long term (Lanius et al., 2010; Schore, 2009). Complex trauma often forces the child victim to substitute automatic survival tactics for adaptive self-regulation, starting at the most basic level of physical reactions (e.g., intense states of hyperarousal/agitation or hypoarousal/immobility) and behavioral (e.g., aggressive or passive/avoidant responses) that can become so automatic and habitual that the child's emotional and cognitive development are derailed or distorted. What is more, self-integrity is profoundly shaken, as the child victim incorporates the "lessons of abuse" into a view of him or herself as bad, inadequate, disgusting, contaminated and deserving of mistreatment and neglect. Such misattributions and related schema about self and others are some of the most common and robust cognitive and assumptive consequences of chronic childhood abuse (as well as other forms of interpersonal trauma) and are especially debilitating to healthy development and relationships (Cole & Putnam, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1992). Because the violation occurs in an interpersonal context that carries profound significance for personal development, relationships become suspect and a source of threat and fear rather than of safety and nurturance. In vulnerable children, complex trauma causes compromised attachment security, self-integrity and ultimately self-regulation. Thus it constitutes a threat not only to physical but also to psychological survival - to the development of the self and the capacity to regulate emotions (Arnold & Fisch, 2011). For example, emotional abuse by an adult caregiver that involves systematic disparagement, blame and shame of a child ("You worthless piece of s-t"; "You shouldn't have been born"; "You are the source of all of my problems"; "I should have aborted you"; "If you don't like what I tell you, you can go hang yourself") but does not involve sexual or physical violation or life threat is nevertheless psychologically damaging. Such bullying and antipathy on the part of a primary caregiver or other family members, in addition to maltreatment and role reversals that are found in many dysfunctional families, lead to severe psychobiological dysregulation and reactivity (Teicher, Samson, Polcari, & McGreenery, 2006).

Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.

At the root of the problem? That sticky wheat protein, gluten. Although the jury is still out on the connections between gluten sensitivity and behavioral or psychological issues, we do know a few facts: People with celiac disease may be at increased risk for developmental delay, learning difficulties, tic disorders, and ADHD.6 Depression and anxiety are often severe in patients with gluten sensitivity.7, 8 This is primarily due to the cytokines that block production of critical brain neurotransmitters like serotonin, which is essential in regulating mood. With the elimination of gluten and often dairy, many patients have been freed from not just their mood disorders but other conditions caused by an overactive immune system, like allergies and arthritis. As many as 45 percent of people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have gastrointestinal problems.9 Although not all gastrointestinal symptoms in ASD result from celiac disease, data shows an increased prevalence of celiac in pediatric cases of autism, compared to the general pediatric population. The good news is that we can reverse many of the symptoms of neurological, psychological, and behavioral disorders just by going gluten-free and adding supplements like DHA and probiotics to our diet.

By shifting the empirical emphasis from the search for mental faculties as unified neurobiological categories towards developing a more componential, constructionist functional architecture of the human brain, the overlap in empirical findings across psychological domains is not a problem for reverse inference, but becomes the engine that drives a more valid approach to reverse inference.

that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.

Experimentation also proved serendipitous for Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, when they were putting together the Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, California, north of San Diego. It was destined to become one of the most successful brewing startups of the 1990s. In The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. Koch and Wagner confess that the home-brewed ale that became Arrogant Bastard Ale and propelled Stone to fame in the craft brewing world, started with a mistake. Greg Koch recalls that Wagner exclaimed “Aw, hell!” as he brewed an ale on his brand spanking new home-brewing system. “I miscalculated and added the ingredients in the wrong percentages,” he told Koch. “And not just a little. There’s a lot of extra malt and hops in there.” Koch recalls suggesting they dump it, but Wagner decided to let it ferment and see what it tasted like. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, founders of Stone Brewery. Photograph © Stone Brewing Co. They both loved the resulting hops bomb, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Koch was sure that nobody was “going to be able to handle it. I mean, we both loved it, but it was unlike anything else that was out there. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but we knew we had to do something with it somewhere down the road.”20 Koch said the beer literally introduced itself as Arrogant Bastard Ale. It seemed ironic to me that a beer from southern California, the world of laid back surfers, should produce an ale with a name that many would identify with New York City. But such are the ironies of the craft brewing revolution. Arrogant Bastard was relegated to the closet for the first year of Stone Brewing Co.’s existence. The founders figured their more commercial brew would be Stone Pale Ale, but its first-year sales figures were not strong, and the company’s board of directors decided to release Arrogant Bastard. “They thought it would help us have more of a billboard effect; with more Stone bottles next to each other on a retail shelf, they become that much more visible, and it sends a message that we’re a respected, established brewery with a diverse range of beers,” Wagner writes. Once they decided to release the Arrogant Bastard, they decided to go all out. The copy on the back label of Arrogant Bastard has become famous in the beer world: Arrogant Bastard Ale Ar-ro-gance (ar’ogans) n. The act or quality of being arrogant; haughty; Undue assumption; overbearing conceit. This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. The label continues along these lines for a couple of hundred words. Some call it a brilliant piece of reverse psychology. But Koch insists he was just listening to the beer that had emerged from a mistake in Wagner’s kitchen. In addition to innovative beers and marketing, Koch and Wagner have also made their San Diego brewery a tourist destination, with the Stone Brewing Bistro & Gardens, with plans to add a hotel to the Stone empire.

In all ages statesmen have found it hard to understand the psychology of revolutionary governments bound to the wheel of armaments and debts. For it is a cycle that cannot be reversed. It can only be broken or its pace accelerated.

Aging and dying are still enigmatic on the molecular scale to modern sciences. However, Avicenna had the broad concept figured out, and his explanation is congruent with our recent knowledge, and with new facts at hand we now can explain his reasoning at the cellular and biochemical levels. Avicenna states, “After the period of youth heat starts to diminish due to the decline in moisture, and in agreement with the internal innate heat and support of physical and psychological actions that are needed, therefore, in the absence of a natural reversal, all bodily functions reach their end

One semester, I was busted for reverse plagiarism, which basically meant I was too lazy to research a paper for my psychology class so cited false references to support my own theories on deviant behavior.

However, if you are interested in using this strategy in combination with the Paleo Approach, more information can be found in Gut and Psychology Syndrome, by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, and Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet, by Elaine Gloria Gottschall.

It has been said that war is merely politics, by other means. In truth, it is much more likely the reverse is true. Clearly, we had war, long before we had politics. Being

couldn’t understand whether he was pimping me or using reverse psychology.

Experimental studies consistently point out that the popular remedy for anger, ventilation, is really worse than useless. In fact, the reverse seems to be true: expressing anger tends to make you even angrier and solidifies an angry attitude.

At Vatican II my mind was growing through the embryonic beginning of a reversal of moral conscience unlike any I had known. I found myself increasingly critical of the Freudian psychoanalysis that had long shaped my interest in personal behavior change. I better recognized the long captivity of Protestant pastoral care to contemporary psychology and became a critic of the very accommodation to modern consciousness that I myself had advocated throughout the preceding decade.

there are some surprising similarities between pantheism and atheism. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin. Both embrace the view that being is univocal: in other words, that there is only one kind of reality or existence. In this perspective, there is reality (that which exists) and then there are particular beings who exist, such as divine and non-divine entities. In the “overcoming estrangement” paradigm of pantheism, the physical world is a weak projection of an eternal (real) world. In the atheistic paradigm (“the stranger we never meet”), the projection is reversed; in fact, the longing for transcendent meaning and truth reflects a form of psychological neurosis, nostalgia for a nonexistent “beyond” that paralyzes our responsibility in the present. In other words, pantheism assumes that the upper world is real and this world is mere appearance, while atheism assumes that this world is real and the upper world is nonexistent.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between modern social and personality psychology is that the former is based almost exclusively on experiments, whereas the latter is usually based on correlational studies. […] In summary, over the past 50 years social psychology has concentrated on the perceptual and cognitive processes of person perceivers, with scant attention to the persons being perceived. Personality psychology has had the reverse orientation, closely examining self-reports of individuals for indications of their personality traits, but rarely examining how these people actually come off in social interaction. […] individuals trained in either social or personality psychology are often more ignorant of the other field than they should be. Personality psychologists sometimes reveal an imperfect understanding of the concerns and methods of their social psychological brethren, and they in particular fail to comprehend the way in which so much of the self-report data they gather fails to overcome the skepticism of those trained in other methods. For their part, social psychologists are often unfamiliar with basic findings and concepts of personality psychology, misunderstand common statistics such as correlation coefficients and other measures of effect size, and are sometimes breathtakingly ignorant of basic psychometric principles. This is revealed, for example, when social psychologists, assuring themselves that they would not deign to measure any entity so fictitious as a trait, proceed to construct their own self-report scales to measure individual difference constructs called schemas or strategies or construals (never a trait). But they often fail to perform the most elementary analyses to confirm the internal consistency or the convergent and discriminant validity of their new measures, probably because they do not know that they should. […] an astonishing number of research articles currently published in major journals demonstrate a complete innocence of psychometric principles. Social psychologists and cognitive behaviorists who overtly eschew any sympathy with the dreaded concept of ‘‘trait’’ freely report the use of self-report assessment instruments of completely unknown and unexamined reliability, convergent validity, or discriminant validity. It is almost as if they believe that as long as the individual difference construct is called a ‘‘strategy,’’ ‘‘schema,’’ or ‘‘implicit theory,’’ then none of these concepts is relevant. But I suspect the real cause of the omission is that many investigators are unfamiliar with these basic concepts, because through no fault of their own they were never taught them.

You encourage the other person to do the opposite of what you want to do with the full expectation that they will rebel against you and end up doing what you really wanted them to do in the first place.

After all, you do not want to burst out laughing just because your mind has raced ahead and seen what is likely to happen when your chosen victim carries out the task that they thought you were totally opposed to.

But the illusion of scarcity works in lots of cases. We react to a perceived shortage by buying up the item, almost regardless of whether or not we want it. Fashion retailers do this all the time - there's only one of each size on display and they do not replenish the display until the item has been sold.

The personality of an individual is decisions they take throughout their life using the experiences of their complete life.

In the early 1900s a Serbian scientist named Milutin Milanković studied the Earth’s position relative to other planets and came up with the theory of ice ages that we now know is accurate: The gravitational pull of the sun and moon gently affect the Earth’s motion and tilt toward the sun. During parts of this cycle—which can last tens of thousands of years—each of the Earth’s hemispheres gets a little more, or a little less, solar radiation than they’re used to. And that is where the fun begins. Milanković’s theory initially assumed that a tilt of the Earth’s hemispheres caused ravenous winters cold enough to turn the planet into ice. But a Russian meteorologist named Wladimir Köppen dug deeper into Milanković’s work and discovered a fascinating nuance. Moderately cool summers, not cold winters, were the icy culprit. It begins when a summer never gets warm enough to melt the previous winter’s snow. The leftover ice base makes it easier for snow to accumulate the following winter, which increases the odds of snow sticking around in the following summer, which attracts even more accumulation the following winter. Perpetual snow reflects more of the sun’s rays, which exacerbates cooling, which brings more snowfall, and on and on. Within a few hundred years a seasonal snowpack grows into a continental ice sheet, and you’re off to the races. The same thing happens in reverse. An orbital tilt letting more sunlight in melts more of the winter snowpack, which reflects less light the following years, which increases temperatures, which prevents more snow the next year, and so on. That’s the cycle. The amazing thing here is how big something can grow from a relatively small change in conditions. You start with a thin layer of snow left over from a cool summer that no one would think anything of and then, in a geological blink of an eye, the entire Earth is covered in miles-thick ice.

Even economics is based on the notion of “revealed preferences.” What people “think” is not relevant—you want to avoid entering the mushy-soft and self-looping discipline of psychology. People’s “explanations” for what they do are just words, stories they tell themselves, not the business of proper science. What they do, on the other hand, is tangible and measurable and that’s what we should focus on. This axiom, perhaps even principle, is very powerful but is not followed too much by researchers. Revelation of preferences is best understood by the betrothed: a diamond, particularly when it is onerous to the buyer, is vastly more convincing a commitment (and much less reversible) than a verbal promise.

From this we learn that when the soul is in a female incarnation it will function negatively in Assiah and Briah, but positively in Yetzirah and Atziluth. In other words, a woman is physically and mentally negative, but psychically and spiritually positive, and the reverse holds good for a man. In initiates, however, there is a considerable degree of compensation, for each learns the technique of both positive and negative psychic methods. The Divine Spark, which is the nucleus of every living soul, is, of course, bisexual, containing the roots of both aspects, as does Kether, to which it corresponds. In the more highly evolved souls the compensating aspect is developed in some degree at least. The purely female woman and the purely male man prove to be oversexed as judged by civilised standards, and can only find an appropriate place in primitive societies, where fertility is the primary demand that society makes upon its women, and hunting and fighting are the constant occupation of the men.

The best indicator is whether or not a green (red) candlestick following a red (green) candlestick which engulfs the candlestick to the left is the best indicator of a coming reversal.

The woods are full of people, theologians among them, who are only too happy to tell you that they are indeed more compassionate than God; more open-minded, humane, mature, responsible, and psychologically integrated. Although they are often rejecting the Bible, they use it like fundamentalists in reverse gear, citing Bible verse after Bible verse to prove that God is simply not as nice as they are.

I’m throwing a dinner party at my house, and you’re coming over.” “I am, huh? I kinda like it when you tell me what to do. For such a pretty boy, you sure can play butch.” He took a pen from the pen cup and wrote an address on a Post-it Note. “This is the house I live in with my brother. I just want to prepare you ahead of time, before you see the place. I do okay as a dentist, but my brother’s the one who put up the down payment. He’s a software engineer. He sold a few apps.” Megan checked the address and nodded. “He sold more than a few apps,” she said. “When you meet him, you should pretend that sort of thing impresses you, and that you think he’s cooler than me. I’ll know you’re faking it, of course, but he could use the self-esteem boost. The dinner party is in honor of his birthday. He’s turning the big three-oh, and he’s not very happy about getting older.” “Can I sit on his lap and sing him Happy Birthday?” “Seven o’clock,” he said. “Don’t bring any food or wine.” “Are you trying to use reverse psychology on me?” “Not at all,” he said. “My brother always gets enough food and wine to feed an army. All you need to bring is your gorgeous self.” “And I will. Wearing nothing but a trench coat,” she said. “Please wear clothes.

Drew winced. “My back hurts. What did you do to me in your front yard? One minute I was standing, then I was flat on my back in the grass.” “I swept the leg,” she said matter-of-factly. “But why?” “Why not? It’s the fastest way to get someone to the ground.” “But we were standing on your lawn.” “Exactly. We were on nice, soft grass. I would have wrestled you sooner, but it’s not safe on the pavement.” “Do you always wrestle with guys?” “Just the ones I like.” She tapped him on the nose. “Boop.” He tapped her right back. “Boop.” She asked, “Now that I’ve taught you to watch out for the leg sweep, what else can I do for you? Breakfast in bed? Pack you a bagged lunch for work today?” He checked the time on her alarm clock. “It’s Saturday, which is a light day, but I do have a few patients after lunch.” “What do you mean it’s a light day? You’re not fully booked? You must not be a very good dentist. Maybe I should get a second opinion on that cap you glued into my mouth all willy-nilly.” He dropped his jaw in mock outrage. “Not a very good dentist? Those are fighting words, you bad girl.” She raised her eyebrows. “Want to take this back out to the front lawn?” “I think we gave your neighbors enough of a show last night.” “True,” she said. “Plus, we already got grass stains all over one change of clothes.” He wrinkled his nose. “Grass stains.” He groaned. He leaned back, resting his head on Megan’s second pillow, where Muffins normally slept. The sea-foam-green linens were a perfect complement to his skin tone. His brown eyes were a rich chocolate with bright flecks and an inner ring that was nearly green. The sheets had been purchased to complement Muffins, with his orange fur and entirely green eyes, but they looked even better around Dr. Drew Morgan. Drew asked, “What are you thinking about?” He reached up to run his fingers through her tangled morning hair. She normally hated that, but it felt good when Drew did it. “I’m thinking that you look really good in my sheets. You look good in sea-foam green.” “Thanks.” He grinned. “I can’t wait to see how you look in my bed.” “You think you’re going to get me into your bed?” “Sure. I know how it’s done. You just sweep the leg.” “I shouldn’t have told you all my secrets.” Muffins returned and situated himself between them for a bath. Drew propped himself up on one elbow and petted the cat. “So what do I have to do to get you to my place in the first place?” “Reverse psychology works well on me. You could tell me to never come over. You could ban me from your house.” He chuckled. “Whatever you do, don’t show up naked under a trench coat.” “What makes you think I’d show up naked in a trench coat?” “You’re a wild girl. Exactly what I need right now.” “You need me? Are we talking about, like, a medical type of emergency?” “You tell me.” He scooped up Muffins, placed him on the chair next to the bed, and pulled Megan close to him.

The lesson here is: don’t always say what you want him to hear. Say what he needs to hear to do what you want! My ego thought it was in control. Yet, she had been the one with the power all along! Reverse psychology works well on three-year-old boys, and it continues to work well on men of all ages.

I learnt that from years of my mother trying to affect me with her reverse psychology, and what she told me about people looking down on me. I developed these negative thoughts and massive self-doubt. The self-doubt which we’ll call ‘my mother’s voice’. The voices seemed to have the ability to build a firewall around my head. Whenever someone praised me for the work that I’d done or complimented me, the voice in my head would immediately put up a firewall, blocking it, and counter it with something negative.

Imagine a world where people say the first thing that comes to mind, a world where you told the truth to everyone you talked with. For example, let’s say you took one look at your boss early in the morning only for you to tell him he looks like a weakling. Or imagine yourself as a salesperson telling a customer how firm and perky her breasts are or a woman telling her male neighbor how nice and tight his butt is.

Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching "modernization" to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: "managed democracy," "conservative modernization." Then he steps back, smiling, and says: "We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself." And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle. Elsewhere Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only "simulacrum" and "simulacra" . . . and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism, before quoting Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra," in English and by heart. If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov's genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representations to validate tranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.