Traits Of A Mother Quotes

I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother, her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don't hold onto the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass kicking your mom gave you or the ass kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s ok. But after a while, the bruises fade and they fade for a reason. Because now, it’s time to get up to some shit again.

Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.

Begin to assess your own parenting. Acknowledging the painful reality that it is impossible to be a child of a narcissist and not be somewhat impaired narcissistically. Anyone raised this way has probably acquired a few traits of narcissism.

And life goes on, which seems kind of strange and cruel when you're watching someone die. But there's a joy and an abundance of everything, like information and laughter and summer weather and so many stories. My mother urges me to write them down because, "You're the last of the Markhams, my love." So I record dates and journeys and personalities and traits and heroes and losers and weaknesses and strengths and I try to capture every one of those people because one day I'll need what they had to offer.

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.

I argued that talking is a female trait and that I would do my best to keep it under control, but that I would never be able to break myself of the habit, since my mother talked as much as I did, if not more, and that there's not much you can do about inherited traits.

I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born. That’s why it’s called the world to come, because that’s where they make the new souls for the future. And the reward when good people die” – her mother paused, swallowed, paused again – “the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven’t been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have – they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it’s up to the new ones, once they’re born, what they’ll use and what they won’t, but that’s what everyone who dies is doing, I think. They get to decide what kind of people the new ones might be able to become.

Misanthropist’s manifesto: Do not tell a friend what your enemy ought not to know. Giving way neither to love nor hate is one half of world wisdom: to say nothing and believe nothing, is the other half. Distrust is the mother of safety. To forget at any time the bad traits of a man’s character is like throwing away hard-earned money. Better to let men be what they are than to take them for what they are not. By being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and obliging: hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Dear Son, I would call you by name, but I’m waiting for your mother to decide. I only hope she is joking when she calls you Albert Dalbert. For weeks now I have watched your mother zealously gather her tokens for this box. She’s so afraid of you not knowing anything about her, and it bothers me greatly that you’ll never know her strength firsthand. I’m sure by the time you read this, you’ll know everything I do about her. But you’ll never know her for yourself and that pains me most of all. I wish you could see the look on her face whenever she talks to you. The sadness she tries so hard to hide. Every time I see it, it cuts through me. She love you so much. You’re all she talks about. I have so many orders from her for you. I’m not allowed to make you crazy the way I do your Uncle Chris. I’m not allowed to call the doctors every time you sneeze and you are to be allowed to tussle with your friends without me having a conniption that someone might bruise you. Nor am I to bully you about getting married or having kids. Ever. Most of all, you are allowed to pick your own car at sixteen. I’m not supposed to put you in a tank. We’ll see about that one. I refuse to promise her this last item until I know more about you. Not to mention, I’ve seen how other people drive on the roads. So if you have a tank, sorry. There’s only so much changing man my age can do. I don’t know what our futures will hold. I only hope that when all is said and done, you are more like your mother than you are like me. She’s a good woman. A kind woman. Full of love and compassion even though her life has been hard and full of grief. She bears her scars with a grace, dignity, and humor that I lack. Most of all, she has courage the likes of which I haven’t witnessed in centuries. I hope with every part of me that you inherit all her best traits and none of my bad ones. I don’t really know what more to say. I just thought you should have something of me in here too. Love, Your father (Wulf)

daredevil nature as a young man. When I read what William Roth had written, I sighed. So that was where my own two boys had gotten the trait that was turning their mother’s hair gray.

Once I’d thought that love was the sum of its parts, the result of a collection of traits and experiences, like a structure steadily built from bricks layered over bricks. If you collect enough of them, there is love. But that had been a child’s view of the world. The bricks were important, but what they created was more than just a pile of stones. It was the difference between a house and a home. If the building burns down, something is still there that makes it home. If the memories are gone, something is still there that makes it love.

I didn't know what I wanted to Be...A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of 3 working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting surfboards...I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent of the Big Win...What is fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the genetic line, and the ability to "succeed" at your chosen "direction" was handed down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed too.

We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving … We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins … We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive are our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers … We are the daughters of the feminists who said, “You can be anything,” and we heard, “You have to be everything.

I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother: her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold on to the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mom gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s okay.

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.

You’re very impatient,” Violet said, facing the door. “You always have been.” “I know,” Eloise said, wondering if this was a scolding, and if so, why was her mother choosing to do it now? “I always loved that about you,” Violet said. “I always loved everything about you, of course, but for some reason I always found your impatience especially charming. It was never because you wanted more, it was because you wanted everything.” Eloise wasn’t so sure that sounded like such a good trait. “You wanted everything for everyone, and you wanted to know it all and learn it all, and . . .” For a moment Eloise thought her mother might be done, but then Violet turned around and added, “You’ve never been satisfied with second-best, and that’s good, Eloise. I’m glad you never married any of those men who proposed in London. None of them would have made you happy. Content, maybe, but not happy.” Eloise felt her eyes widen with surprise. “But don’t let your impatience become all that you are,” Violet said softly. “Because it isn’t, you know. There’s a great deal more to you, but I think sometimes you forget that.” She smiled, the gentle, wise smile of a mother saying goodbye to her daughter.

Things like that gave me the first glimmering of the universal female gospel that all good traits and leanings come from the mother's side.

commonly, though, a disturbed teenager will be unpleasant: aggressive, belligerent, obnoxious, irritable, hostile, lazy, whiny, untrustworthy, sometimes with poor personal hygiene. But the fact that they’re so difficult, so dedicated to pushing us away, does not mean they do not need help. In fact, these traits may be signals that they do.

was my mother’s favourite child. I was orderly and docile and quiet, and those traits made it easy for her to like me, to understand me. My sisters were difficult girls: too sexy, too angry, too hard to handle. They wanted too much. They were too willing to put their bodies and lives in the way of the world.

Highly sensitive children can come from mothers and fathers with the same traits. In addition, parenting plays a role. Childhood neglect or abuse can also affect sensitivity levels for adults. A portion of empaths I’ve treated have experienced early trauma, such as emotional or physical abuse, or were raised by alcoholic, depressed, or narcissistic parents. This could potentially wear down the usual healthy defenses that a child with nurturing parents develops. As a result of their upbringing, these children typically don’t feel “seen” by their families, and they also feel invisible in the greater world that doesn’t value sensitivity.

If we, as mothers, are not careful we can begin to find our identity in our children and their behavior

Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.

hate housework. It's in my genes, a trait inherited from my mother who claimed that a tidy house was the sign of an empty life.

But my mother-in-law didn’t admit to mistakes, a nifty little trait she’d handed down to her son.

Baghra,” Nikolai said, “how are you this evening?” “Still old and blind,” she snarled. “And charming,” Nikolai drawled. “Never forget charming.” “Whelp.” “Hag.” “What do you want, pest?” “I’ve brought someone to visit,” Nikolai said, giving me a push. Why was I so nervous? “Hello, Baghra,” I managed. She paused, motionless. “The little Saint,” she murmured, “returned to save us all.” “Well, she did almost die trying to rid us of your cursed spawn,” Nikolai said lightly. I blinked. So Nikolai knew Baghra was the Darkling’s mother. “Couldn’t even manage martyrdom right, could you?” Baghra waved me in. “Come in and shut the door, girl. You’re letting the heat out.” I grinned at this familiar refrain. “And you,” she spat in Nikolai’s direction. “Go somewhere you’re wanted.” “That’s hardly limiting,” he said. “Alina, I’ll be back to fetch you for dinner, but should you grow restless, do feel free to run screaming from the room or take a dagger to her. Whatever seems most fitting at the time.” “Are you still here?” snapped Baghra. “I go but hope to remain in your heart,” he said solemnly. Then he winked and disappeared. “Wretched boy.” “You like him,” I said in disbelief. Baghra scowled. “Greedy. Arrogant. Takes too many risks.” “You almost sound concerned.” “You like him too, little Saint,” she said with a leer in her voice. “I do,” I admitted. “He’s been kind when he might have been cruel. It’s refreshing.” “He laughs too much.” “There are worse traits.

Anatomy and biological process aside, creating life is a miracle, and should stay that way. Yes, we can—and we should—use our knowledge and our technology to insure the health and safety of the mother and child. Eliminate birth defects and disease whenever possible. But crossing that line into designing babies? Manipulating emotions, physical appearance, mental capacity, even personality traits? That’s no miracle. It’s ego.” The

She’s a master of projection. 'Projection' in this context means the psychological tendency to see one's undesirable traits in another. And narcissists cannot, of course, bear to own their undesirable traits, so they have to get rid of them, so to speak, as soon as possible. So they hand them to the nearest recipient who'll take them. And their children are of course very handy for this, as they unquestioningly believe their parents.

But I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother: her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold on to the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mom gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s okay. But after a while the bruises fade, and they fade for a reason—because now it’s time to get up to some shit again.

The argument against faith is all based upon the rigorous analysis of the scriptures, and not upon the objective observation of the actual individual sensation of faith. Historical experiences of the Kingdom of God gave rise to all the scriptures in the world, but the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human mind. Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.

Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits — otherwise known as coping styles — magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs — or fails to occur — during childhood. The way people grow up shapes their relationship with their own bodies and psyches. The emotional contexts of childhood interact with inborn temperament to give rise to personality traits. Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood. There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival. What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits — for example, when a person describes herself as “a control freak.” In reality, there is no innate human inclination to be controlling. What there is in a “controlling” personality is deep anxiety. The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail. When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style. Emotional repression is also a coping style rather than a personality trait set in stone. Not one of the many adults interviewed for this book could answer in the affirmative when asked the following: When, as a child, you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone you could talk to — even when he or she was the one who had triggered your negative emotions? In a quarter century of clinical practice, including a decade of palliative work, I have never heard anyone with cancer or with any chronic illness or condition say yes to that question. Many children are conditioned in this manner not because of any intended harm or abuse, but because the parents themselves are too threatened by the anxiety, anger or sadness they sense in their child — or are simply too busy or too harassed themselves to pay attention. “My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression.

I argued that talking is a female trait and that I would do my best to keep it under control, but that I would never be able to break myself of the habit, since my mother talked as much as I did, if not more, and that there’s not much you can do about inherited traits.

Raised by a progressive mother, Rosabella was outspoken, free-willed, and passionate about her beliefs. Even though she was from Royal heritage, she rarely wore a tiara. She chose comfortable, layered dresses and tall, fake-fur-lined boots rather than filigreed gowns and platforms.

Isms’ are described as transference of addictive patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, passed down from generation to generation. For instance, if a mother was an alcoholic who never made it into recovery, her behaviour would leave a mark on her children, husband, etc. Unless her adult children join some sort of recovery programme and adopt the mindfulness practice, they will have very similar behaviour traits to their mother but minus the alcohol abuse. There is a strong possibility that they will become codependent and form relationships with other codependents or alcoholics.

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O'Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family's life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in "taking care" of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn't and couldn't understand her.

I am nine. We are bored and Karen is dying. We drove to Austin that summer so Sarah's dad- who described Karen as /the great and impossible love/ of his life, who taught us the word /lymphoma/ and then, the concept of the prefix, how it explains where the tumor lives- could say goodbye. The house is a rind spooned out by the onset of death, what's left in the medicine cabinet full of razors & we are hungry & alone & sitting on the living room floor where the light from a naked window slices the hardwood like a melon, brandishes each, individualfuzz on my scabbed calf a field of erect, yellow poppies & we have been alive as girls long enough to know to scowl at this reveal & what better time than now to practice removal. Once, I watched my mother skin a potato in six perfect strokes I remember this as Sarah teaches me to prop up my leg on the side of the tub and runs the blade along my thing, /See?/ she says, /Isn't that so much better?/ Before we left Albuquerque her father warned us, /She will have no hair/ a trait we have just begun to admire except, of course for the hair he is talking about we hold against our necks, that which will get us compliments or scouted in a mall, eventually cut off by our envious sisters while we sleep.

As he grew, the young Prince became very dear to the Spider Mage. He had his mother's charm and grace, without her volatile nature. He had his father's intellect, without his anger and sullenness. And he had a kind and loving heart, which longed for one thing only: for his parents to love each other, as he loved them both.

At first I wondered why I would be born to a father who behaved like that. But I finally accepted the fact that my parents had the exact combination of traits and interests to inspire my own evolution. That’s why I wanted to be with them in my early life. Looking at my mother, I knew that each of us must take responsibility for our own healing. We can’t just turn it over to others. Healing in its essence is about breaking through the fears associated with life—fears that we don’t want to face—and finding our own special inspiration, a vision of the future, that we know we’re here to help create. “From my father, I saw clearly that medicine must be more responsive, must acknowledge the intuition and vision of the people we treat. We have to come down from our ivory tower. The combination of the two set me up to look for a new paradigm in medicine: one based on the patient’s ability to take control of his or her life and to get back on the right path. That’s my message, I guess, the idea that inwardly we know how to participate in our own healing, physically and emotionally. We can become inspired to shape a higher, more ideal future, and when we do, miracles happen.” Standing up, she glanced at my ankle, then at me. “I’m leaving now,” she said. “Try not to put any weight on your foot. What you need is complete rest. I’ll be back in the morning.” I think I must have looked anxious, because she knelt down again and put both hands on the ankle. “Don’t worry,” she said. “With enough energy there’s nothing that can’t be healed— hatred… war. It’s just a matter of coming together with the right vision.” She patted my foot gently. “We can heal this! We can heal this!

English. I believe the ultimate gauge of success is this: Does the text free the reader? Does it contribute to our physical and emotional health? Does it put “golden tools” into our hands that can help excavate the Beloved whom we and society have buried so deep inside? Persian poets of Hafiz’s era would often address themselves in their poems, making the poem an intimate conversation. This was also a method of “signing” the poem, as one might sign a letter to a friend, or a painting. It should also be noted that sometimes Hafiz speaks as a seeker, other times as a master and guide. Hafiz also has a unique vocabulary of names for God—as one might have endearing pet names for one’s own family members. To Hafiz, God is more than just the Father, the Mother, the Infinite, or a Being beyond comprehension. Hafiz gives God a vast range of names, such as Sweet Uncle, the Generous Merchant, the Problem Giver, the Problem Solver, the Friend, the Beloved. The words Ocean, Sky, Sun, Moon, and Love, among others, when capitalized in these poems, can sometimes be synonyms for God, as it is a Hafiz trait to offer these poems to many levels of interpretation simultaneously. To Hafiz, God is Someone we can meet, enter, and eternally explore.

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate. The great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale. As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion. They are in no position to complain, and their passivity and abjection is considered a sterling trait. It is time to recognize that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.

Mother thinks that Mrs. van D. is too stupid for words, Margot that she's too unimportant, Pim that she's too ugly (literally and figuratively!), and after long observation (I'm never prejudiced at the beginning), I've come to the conclusion that she's all three of the above, and lots more besides. She has so many bad traits, why should I single out just one of them? PS. Will the reader please take into consideration that this story was written before the writter's fury had cooled?

And if I was seen as temperamentally cool and collected, measured in how I used my words, Joe was all warmth, a man without inhibitions, happy to share whatever popped into his head. It was an endearing trait, for he genuinely enjoyed people. You could see it as he worked a room, his handsome face always cast in a dazzling smile (and just inches from whomever he was talking to), asking a person where they were from, telling them a story about how much he loved their hometown (“Best calzone I ever tasted”) or how they must know so-and-so (“An absolutely great guy, salt of the earth”), flattering their children (“Anyone ever tell you you’re gorgeous?”) or their mother (“You can’t be a day over forty!”), and then on to the next person, and the next, until he’d touched every soul in the room with a flurry of handshakes, hugs, kisses, backslaps, compliments, and one-liners. Joe’s enthusiasm had its downside. In a town filled with people who liked to hear themselves talk, he had no peer. If a speech was scheduled for fifteen minutes, Joe went for at least a half hour. If it was scheduled for a half hour, there was no telling how long he might talk. His soliloquies during committee hearings were legendary. His lack of a filter periodically got him in trouble, as when during the primaries, he had pronounced me “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” a phrase surely meant as a compliment, but interpreted by some as suggesting that such characteristics in a Black man were noteworthy. As I came to know Joe, though, I found his occasional gaffes to be trivial compared to his strengths. On domestic issues, he was smart, practical, and did his homework. His experience in foreign policy was broad and deep. During his relatively short-lived run in the primaries, he had impressed me with his skill and discipline as a debater and his comfort on a national stage. Most of all, Joe had heart. He’d overcome a bad stutter as a child (which probably explained his vigorous attachment to words) and two brain aneurysms in middle age.

In the eighteenth century, the mother's imagination became the default explanation for unwanted traits. Her uncanny influence extended to breastfeeding, by which she infused the child with "her ideas, beliefs, intelligence, intellect, diet and speech," along with "her other physical and emotional qualities." This mystical conception of maternity made the mother an easy target for perceived defects in the baby. It was also a reason to be suspicious of her curiosity and passions and to curtail her exposure to the world.

And the reward when good people die" - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - "the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.

It would have been a disaster if Laszlo’s Asperger’s had prevented him from contributing to a cancer cure; if Rosie’s status as a mother had resulted in her removal from the bipolar-disorder project; and if Hudson’s autistic traits had blocked his journey to high school, human-rights advocate, and possibly—as suggested by the anonymous voice at the cross-country race—prime minister, where he would have the power to change the system. And if Laura and I had been prevented from changing the world by our failure to resolve a personal issue.

While it was irrational to bristle at the company of compatriots, one of the traits that Americans seem to share is a common dislike of running into one another in foreign countries. Perhaps it was having that mirror held up, reflecting an image so often loud, aggressive, and overweight. Irina didn’t have a big problem with being American herself (everyone has to come from somewhere, and you don’t get to choose), although, a second-generation Russian on her mother’s side, she had always presumed her nationality to have an opt-out clause. Maybe she

share the same bad traits: They drink too much, or cheat on you. Maybe you have been trying to improve your health by going on a diet and exercise program. Except that you’ve started and stopped this same exercise and diet program about eleven times. You can stay on the diet for about six days and then you go on a feeding frenzy! And you wake up at 6 A.M. for three days and go for a run but on day four it’s raining and you never make it to the park again. Until the twelfth time you start the program. Or perhaps you’ve been meaning to get along better with your mother. You love her and

Narcissistic traits that you unwittingly acquired will also haunt you in your relationships with other adults. Recognize these traits so that you can get control of them. This will be difficult, but that does not mean you are not a good person. Nor does it mean that you are not good enough. It means that you are human, and you have issues related to a painful, difficult childhood. As an adult, however, you want to become totally accountable, to take an honest look in the mirror. You can move past the pain and sadness and experience, and allow yourself to grow emotionally, and integrate the many complex parts of yourself.

Of course it would be easier to help depressed teens if they were nicer to be around, or more communicative about their thoughts. If only they looked like the kids in the pamphlets do: clean-cut and attractive, staring out a rainy window with a wistful expression, chin propped on a fist! More commonly, though, a disturbed teenager will be unpleasant: aggressive, belligerent, obnoxious, irritable, hostile, lazy, whiny, untrustworthy, sometimes with poor personal hygiene. But the fact that they’re so difficult, so dedicated to pushing us away, does not mean they do not need help. In fact, these traits may be signals that they do.

It's a fast but wimpy tumor," he explains. "It typically metastasizes to the lung." He rattles off some numbers, time frames, risk statistics. Fast but wimpy: the Mother tries to imagine this combination of traits, tries to think and think, and can only come up with Claudia Osk from the fourth grade, who blushed and almost wept when called on in class, but in gym could outrun everyone in the quarter-mile fire-door-to-fence dash. The Mother thinks now of this tumor as Claudia Osk. They are going to get Claudia Osk, make her sorry. All right! Claudia Osk must die. Though it has never been mentioned before, it now seems clear that Claudia Osk should have died long ago.

You must also know clearly what you want out of the situation, and be prepared to clearly articulate your desire. It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing. You might think, “if they loved me, they would know what to do.” That’s the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs—not even you. If you try to determine exactly what you want, you might find that it is more difficult than you think. The person oppressing you is likely no wiser than you, especially about you. Tell them directly what would be preferable, instead, after you have sorted it out. Make your request as small and reasonable as possible—but ensure that its fulfillment would satisfy you. In that manner, you come to the discussion with a solution, instead of just a problem. Agreeable, compassionate, empathic, conflict-averse people (all those traits group together) let people walk on them, and they get bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and cannot comprehend why that is not reciprocated. Agreeable people are compliant, and this robs them of their independence. The danger associated with this can be amplified by high trait neuroticism. Agreeable people will go along with whoever makes a suggestion, instead of insisting, at least sometimes, on their own way. So, they lose their way, and become indecisive and too easily swayed. If they are, in addition, easily frightened and hurt, they have even less reason to strike out on their own, as doing so exposes them to threat and danger (at least in the short term). That’s the pathway to dependent personality disorder, technically speaking.198 It might be regarded as the polar opposite of antisocial personality disorder, the set of traits characteristic of delinquency in childhood and adolescence and criminality in adulthood. It would be lovely if the opposite of a criminal was a saint—but it’s not the case. The opposite of a criminal is an Oedipal mother, which is its own type of criminal.

How long have you known about him?” I asked Jesse, using my free hand to gesture toward his guest. “Forever. Nearly as long as I did about you.” “God, Jesse. Why didn’t you say anything?” “He was a shadow of you.” Jesse shrugged. “His background is diluted, his dragon blood les strong. Even with you in his proximity, I wasn’t certain any of his drakon traits would emerge. He hasn’t anywhere near your potential.” “Pardon me,” Armand said, freezingly polite, “but he is still right here with you in this room.” “Do you mean…I did it?” I asked. “I made him figure it out? What he is?” Jesse gave me an assessing look. “Like is drawn to like. We’re all three of us thick with magic now, even if it’s different kinds. It’s inevitable that we’ll feed off one another. The only way to prevent that would be to separate. And even then it might not be enough. Too much has already begun.” “I don’t want to separate from you,” I said. “No.” Jesse lifted our hands and gave mine a kiss. “Don’t worry about that.” Armand practically rolled his eyes. “If you two are quite done, might we talk some sense tonight? It’s late, I’m tired, and your ruddy chair, Holms, is about as comfortable as sitting on a tack. I want to…” But his voice only faded into silence. He closed his eyes and raised a hand to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose. I noted again those shining nails. The elegance of his bones beneath his flawless skin. Skin that was marble-pale, I realized. Just like mine. “Yes?” I said, more gently than I’d intended. “Excuse me. I’m finding this all a bit…impossible to process. I’m beginning to believe that this is the most profoundly unpleasant dream I’ve ever been caught in.” “Allow me to assure you that you’re awake, Lord Armand,” I retorted, all gentleness gone. “To wit: You hear music no one else does. Distinctive music from gemstones and all sorts of metals. That day I played the piano at Tranquility, I was playing your father’s ruby song, one you must have heard exactly as I did. Exactly as your mother would have. You also have, perhaps, something like a voice inside you. Something specific and base, stronger than instinct, hopeless to ignore. Animals distrust you. You might even dream of smoke or flying.” He dropped his arm. “You got that from the diary.” “No, I got that from my own life. And damned lucky you are to have been brought into this world as a pampered little prince instead of spending your childhood being like this and still having to fend for yourself, as I did.” “Right. Lucky me.” Armand looked at Jesse, his eyes glittering. “And what are you? Another dragon? A gargoyle, perchance, or a werecat?” “Jesse is a star.” The hand went up to conceal his face again. “Of course he is. The. Most. Unpleasant. Dream. Ever.” I separated my hand from Jesse’s, angling for more bread. “I think you’re going to have to show him.” “Aye.” A single blue eye blinked open between Armand’s fingers. “Show me what?

Now, if I find liberation in moments of doubt, it comes with the one movement I always end up having to make, the only movement I can make—away from the abstract, general, and hypothetical and back into the jagged grain of the here and now, into the humanizing specificity of my love for my father, mother, brother, wife, and children, and into my sheer delight in their existence as distinct and irreplaceable people, not “bodies”—as contemporary lingo would have it—or avatars, sites of racial characteristics and traits, reincarnations of conflicts and prejudices past. Through these people I love, I am left with myself as the same, as a man and a human being who is free to choose and who has made choices and is not reducible to a set of historical circumstances and mistakes.

[Scarlett] knew how to smile so that her dimples leaped, how to walk pigeon-toed so that her wide hoop skirts swayed entrancingly, how to look up into a man's face and then drop her eyes and bat the lids rapidly so that she seemed a-tremble with gentle emotion. Most of all she learned how to conceal from men a sharp intelligence beneath a face as sweet and bland as a baby's. Ellen, by soft admonition, . . . labored to inculcate in her the qualities that would make her truly desirable as a wife. "You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate," Ellen told her daughter. "You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls." [Ellen] taught her all that a gentlewoman should know, but she learned only the outward signs of gentility. The inner grace from which these signs should spring, she never learned nor did she see any reason for learning it. Appearances were enough, for the appearances of ladyhood won her popularity and that was all she wanted. . . . At sixteen, thanks to Mammy and Ellen, she looked sweet, charming and giddy, but she was, in reality, self-silled, vain and obstinate. She had the easily stirred passions of her Irish father and nothing except the thinnest veneer of her mother's unselfish and forbearing nature. . . It was not that these two loving mentors deplored Scarlett's high spirits, vivacity and charm. These were traits of which Southern women were proud. It was Gerald's headstrong and impetuous nature in her that gave them concern, and they sometimes feared they would not be able to conceal her damaging qualities until she had made a good match. But Scarlett intended to marry-and marry Ashley-and she was willing to appear demure, pliable and scatterbrained, if those were the qualities that attracted men. Just why men should be this way, she did not know. She only knew that such methods worked. It never interested her enough to try to think out the reason for it, for she knew nothing of the inner workings of any human being's mind, not even her own. She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complementary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult . . . If she knew little about men's minds, she knew even less about the minds of women, for they interested her less. She had never had a girl friend, and she never felt any lack on that account. To her, all women, including her two sisters, were natural enemies in pursuit of the same prey-man.

High levels of female hormone seem to enhance coordination skills in women. From early on, girls are superior in tasks requiring rapid, skillful, fine movements as well as, of course, in everything requiring verbal fluency and articulation. However, girls with the highest oestrogen levels seem to be at an intellectual disadvantage, while boyish girls do particularly well in the field of spatial skills - the traditional area of male advantage. There is growing support for the belief that girls with male character traits such as aggression, independence, self-confidence and assertion tend to achieve higher academic success than the norm for their sex. Teenage girls whose mothers took male hormones during pregnancy have higher overall IQs, and are more likely to pass university extramce examsinations. They also seem to be disproportionately interested, for their sex, in science subjects.

The trouble with Donald had started long before he entered school. At home, he tormented his little brother, Robert, a year and a half younger, and seemed to have nothing but disdain for everybody else, including, and perhaps especially, his mother. The kids in the neighborhood alternately despised and feared him; he had a reputation for being a thin-skinned bully who beat up on younger kids but ran home in a fit of rage as soon as somebody stood up to him. Nobody liked Donald when he was growing up, not even his parents. As he got older, those personality traits hardened, the hostile indifference and aggressive disrespect that he’d developed as a toddler to help him withstand the neglect he suffered at his parents’ hands—from his mother because she was seriously ill and psychologically unstable, and from his father because, as a sociopath, he had no interest in his children outside of Freddy, who, at least initially, was being groomed to take over his empire.

Here’s an imaginary twin pair that would be God’s gift to behavior geneticists—identical twin boys separated at birth. One, Shmuel, is raised as an Orthodox Jew in the Amazon; the other, Wolfie, is raised as a Nazi in the Sahara. Reunite them as adults and see if they do similar quirky things like, say, flushing the toilet before using it. Flabbergastingly, one twin pair came close to that. They were born in 1933 in Trinidad to a German Catholic mother and a Jewish father; when the boys were six months of age, the parents separated; the mother returned to Germany with one son, and the other remained in Trinidad with the father. The latter was raised there and in Israel as Jack Yufe, an observant Jew whose first language was Yiddish. The other, Oskar Stohr, was raised in Germany as a Hitler Youth zealot. Reunited and studied by Bouchard, they warily got to know each other, discovering numerous shared behavioral and personality traits including . . . flushing the toilet before use.

Modeling Modeling is the process of watching how others act in certain situations, then copying their behavior. For example, if you are worried about the first impression you make, pay attention to how others present themselves. What traits give a good first impression? What do people say? How do confident people carry themselves? Also examine people who give a bad first impression and try to determine why. Imitate the actions that impressed you. With time, you will feel more comfortable with modeling and begin to own the traits you admire in others. Modeling works very well when you are in an unfamiliar situation. If you are not sure how to act, watching others will give you clues. Sam’s best friend’s father passed away and Sam attended the service. He had never been to a funeral before and felt very uncomfortable. As he stood in the receiving line, he felt anxious about what to say and how to act. He was terrified of saying the wrong thing and hurting his friend’s family. Sam stepped out of line and stood to the side for a moment. He observed what other people did as he breathed deeply and practiced relaxation techniques. After a few minutes, he figured out what to do and returned to the line. When he reached his friend’s mother, he gave her a hug and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” She hugged him back and thanked him for coming. Sam felt confident that he had acted appropriately.

Of all the stupid and destructive products of 1960s-style liberation politics, the effective abolition of marriage (and hence of family, properly understood) will, in the end, turn out to be the worst. And spare me your banal self-justifications: “I divorced my child’s mother, but I’m a good father!” “I was never married to my child’s father, but I’m a good mother.” I’m sure you think you are. You aren’t. Statistically speaking, your domestic situation is about as healthy for your children as would be your picking up a drug habit. (Yes, yes, I’m sure that you are the special-snowflake exception to the rule. One of these days, a three-legged horse might win the Kentucky Derby, too.) The numbers are the numbers. Strange thing: Wildly different philosophical and religious orientations all point to the same central fact of human life. In Genesis, it’s “male and female he created them.” In Plato, we spend our lives seeking the lost half of ourselves from which we were separated by the gods. In good ol’ Darwinian terms, the getting of healthy offspring is the very purpose of life itself. We parted ways with the chimps a few eons ago, and somewhere along the way we developed habits and institutions that helped us to connect our libidos with one of our most useful and uniquely human traits: the ability to engage in long-term planning, even beyond our own lives. And then, around 1964, we said: “To Hell with it, let’s just be chimps.” And here we are.

emotionally immature people are more like an amalgam of various borrowed parts, many of which don’t go together well. Because they had to shut down important parts of themselves out of fear of their parents’ reactions, their personalities formed in isolated clumps, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together. This explains their inconsistent reactions, which make them so difficult to understand. Because they probably weren’t allowed to express and integrate their emotional experiences in childhood, these people grow up to be emotionally inconsistent adults. Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors. They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children. One woman described her mother’s behavior as chaotic, “flip-flopping in ways that made no sense.” This inconsistency means that, as parents, emotionally immature people may be either loving or detached, depending on their mood. Their children feel fleeting moments of connection with them but don’t know when or under what conditions their parent might be emotionally available again. This sets up what behavioral psychologists call an intermittent reward situation, meaning that getting a reward for your efforts is possible but completely unpredictable. This creates a tenacious resolve to keep trying to get the reward, because once in a while these efforts do pay off. In this way, parental inconsistency can be the quality that binds children most closely to their parent, as they keep hoping to get that infrequent and elusive positive response.

You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons. That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family—Katie Brindle—sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes: What Mrs. Brindle doesn’t do that is routine for middle-class mothers is view her daughter’s interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie’s interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter’s talent. Instead she frames Katie’s skills and interests as character traits—singing and acting are part of what makes Katie “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as “cute” and as a way for Katie to “get attention.

I think, too, about how there are many ways to defend oneself from the unspeakable. Here’s one: you split off unwanted parts of yourself, hide behind a false self, and develop narcissistic traits. You say, „Yeah, this catastrophic thing has happened, but I’m A-Okay. Nothing can touch me because I’m special. A special surprise. When John was a boy, wrapping himself in the memory of his mother’s delight was a way to shield himself from the horror of life’s utter unpredictability. He may have comforted himself this way as an adult too, clinging to how special he was after Gabe died. Because the one certainty that John can count on in this world is that he is a special person surrounded by idiots.

Those afflicted with BPD suffer from emotional instability—in Katherine’s case, almost always caused by feelings of rejection or abandonment. They suffer from cognitive distortions, where they see the world in black and white, with anyone who isn’t actively ‘with them’ being considered an enemy. They are also prone to catastrophising, where they make logical leaps from minor impediments in their plans to assumptions of absolute ruin. BPD is often characterised by extremely intense but unstable relationships, as the sufferer gives everything that they can to a relationship in their attempts to ensure their partner never leaves but instead end up burning themselves out and blaming that same partner for the emotional toll that it takes on them. The final trait of BPD is impulsive behaviour, often characterised as self-destructive behaviour. In Katherine’s case, this almost always manifested itself in her hair-trigger temper. When she was enraged, it was like she lost all rational control over her actions, seeing everyone else as her enemies. This manifested itself in the ridiculous bullying she conducted at school, in her lashing out when she failed her test and in the vengeance that she took on her sexual abusers. It is likely that she inherited this disorder from her mother, who showed many of the same symptoms, and that they were exacerbated by her chaotic home life and the lack of healthy relationships in the adults around her that she might have modelled herself after. With Katherine, it was like a Jekyll and Hyde switch took place when her temper was raised. The charming, eager-to-please girl who usually occupied her body was replaced with a furious, foul-mouthed hellion bent on exacting her revenge no matter what the cost. In itself, this could have been an excellent excuse for almost everything that she did wrong in her life, up to and including the crimes that she would later be accused of. Unfortunately, this sort of ‘flipped switch’ argument doesn’t hold up when you consider that her choice to arm herself with a lethal weapon was premeditated. Part of this may certainly have been the cognitive distortion that Katherine experienced, telling her that everyone else was out to get her and that she had to defend herself, but ultimately, she was choosing to give a weapon to a person who would use it to end lives, if she had the opportunity. Assuming that this division of personalities actually existed, then ‘good’ Katherine was an accomplice to ‘bad’ Katherine, giving her the material support and planning that she needed to commit her vicious attacks.

I saw a little child throwing pillows on the floor and screaming, and soon later picking up those same pillows to listen to a story her mother was reading in a coffee shop. However, after a few minutes, the child started crying again, this time, not throwing any pillows on the floor, but simply demanding to go somewhere else, leading her mother to promptly obey. And that's when I realized, there was nothing wrong with that child, but with the culture. For the adults of this country behave in the same way. They complain when they can't get what they want, and once they do, they manipulate others to get more. It is not a cultural trait as much as it is not an educational issue. It's, pretty much, a problem of mass imbecility. You cannot expect an adult, that never grew up, to educate a child or provide her with a culture in which she can, herself, mature. And that's why in certain countries, there is the illusion that you are dealing with adults and children, when in fact you are only dealing with children. When these children become fed up of crying and demanding, and throwing pillows on the floor, they commit suicide, simply because they are fed up of being irresponsible and unaccountable for their actions. They don't need psychologists, but violence. And the violence they get, in many forms, from neighboring nations wanting to destroy them; for nobody wants to deal with adults behaving like immature children. The infantilization of a nation is only one of the traits contributing to its downfall, but probably one of the most important.

Take, for example, a young man who had a distant, narcissistic mother. As an infant or child, he experienced her coldness as abandonment, and to be abandoned must mean he was somehow unworthy of her love. Or similarly, a new sibling on the scene caused his mother to give him much less attention, which he equally experienced as abandonment. Later in life, in a relationship, a woman might hint at disapproval of some trait or action of his, all of which is part of a healthy relationship. This will hit a trigger point—she is noticing his flaws, which, he imagines, precedes her abandonment of him. He feels a powerful rush of emotion, a sense of imminent betrayal. He does not see the source of this; it is beyond his control. He overreacts, accuses, withdraws, all of which leads to the very thing he feared—abandonment. His reaction was to some reflection in his mind, not to the reality. This is the height of irrationality.

Only God is infinite, incomprehensible, self-existent, eternal, immutable, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and sovereign. When we strive to become like him in any of these traits, we set ourselves up as his rival. Human beings created to bear the image of God aspire instead to become like God (...) Like our father Adam and our mother Eve, we long for that which is only intended for God, rejecting our God-given limits and craving the limitlessness we foolishly believe we are capable of wielding and entitled to possess.

The social difficulties experienced by patients with anorexia are not only caused by the patients’ deficits in interpreting others’ minds. There is evidence that they present an unemotional “flat” face to others (Lang et al. 2016), and this can lead to failed social encounters. This is reminiscent of babies’ extreme distress when their mothers presented an unmoving expression to them, just for a minute or two (Weinberg et al. 2008; Tronick 2018). In other words, we are all expecting emotional expression in others and find it very unpleasant when we meet someone who presents a flat, unemotional face. The dependency on confirmation from others corresponds with major trends in contemporary culture, with great emphasis on visuality, bodily surfaces, external qualities, performances, etc. A central psychological trait in both contemporary culture and highly aggravated in eating disorders is the emphasis on comparison and comparison anxiety . Many are obsessively comparing themselves with others, concerning bodies, numbers and amounts of food, hence depending on profoundly superficial data.

Vera always expected bad news; it was a trait they [Vera and Hap Briscoe] shared, the pessimism of people who have had their full share. Your mother's lost her job, your father's child support payment is late, your crazy brother has knocked out the principal's son, your mother is not speaking to your father again. Pessimism wasn't a negative trait for them. It was a way to consistently feel happier, each mediocre event a triumph over potential calamity.

Natural selection at the individual level, with strategies evolving that contribute maximum number of mature offspring, has prevailed throughout the history of life. It typically shapes the physiology and behavior of organisms to suit a solitary existence, or at most to membership in loosely organized groups. The origin of eusociality, in which organisms behave in the opposite manner, has been rare in the history of life because group selection must be exceptionally powerful to relax the grip of individual selection. Only then can it modify the conservative effect of individual selection and introduce highly cooperative behavior into the physiology and behavior of the group members. The ancestors of ants and other hymenopterous eusocial insects (ants, bees, wasps) faced the same problem as those of humans. They finnessed it by evolving extreme plasticity of certain genes, programmed so that the altruistic workers have the same genes for physiology and behavior as the mother queen, even though they differ drastically from the queen and among one another in these traits. Selection has remained at the individual level, queen to queen. Yet selection in the insect societies continues at the group level, with colony pitted against colony. This seeming paradox is easily resolved. As far as natural selection in most forms of social behavior is concerned, the colony is operationally only the queen and her phenotypic extension in the form of robot-like assistants.

Twelve years later the memories of those nights, of that sleep deprivation, still make me rock back and forth a little bit. You want to torture someone? Hand them an adorable baby they love who doesn’t sleep. Badge of honor? Necessary evil, yes. Pain in the ass, yes. Badge of honor? Are you freaking kidding me? Who believes that crap? Who is drinking THAT crazy Kool-Aid? But a lot of people are. MOST people are. I don’t think it ever occurred to me before how much and how often women are praised for displaying traits that basically render them invisible. When I really think about it, I realize the culprit is the language generally used to praise women. Especially mothers. “She sacrificed everything for her children . . . She never thought about herself . . . She gave up everything for us . . . She worked tirelessly to make sure we had what we needed. She stood in the shadows, she was the wind beneath our wings.” Greeting card companies are built on that idea.

#11forJacob Movement Jacob Wetterling loved sports. His dad coached his soccer team. He wanted to be a football player. He was a skilled hockey goalie. Jacob also believed in a fair and just world, a world where all children know they are special and deserve to be safe. We ask you to be part of #11forJacob. This movement centers around 11 simple traits that Jacob valued: Be fair Be kind Be understanding Be honest Be thankful Be a good sport Be a good friend Be joyful Be generous Be gentle with others Be positive

I think, too, about how there are many ways to defend oneself from the unspeakable. Here’s one: you split off unwanted parts of yourself, hide behind a false self, and develop narcissistic traits. You say, Yeah, this catastrophic thing has happened, but I’m A-Okay. Nothing can touch me because I’m special. A special surprise. When John was a boy, wrapping himself in the memory of his mother’s delight was a way to shield himself from the horror of life’s utter unpredictability. He may have comforted himself this way as an adult too, clinging to how special he was after Gabe died. Because the one certainty that John can count on in this world is that he is a special person surrounded by idiots. Through his tears, John says that this is exactly what he didn’t want to happen, that he didn’t come here to have a breakdown. But I assure him that he’s not breaking down; he’s breaking open.

Thus, when someone smiles at us, we are likely to smile in response, which in turn makes us feel a little more positively about them and our circumstances in general. In this manner, laughter will tend to prompt laughter, anger will prompt anger, and tears will prompt tears. From an evolutionary standpoint, the emotional contagion is an important trait. It’s what allows a mother to comfort a child so effectively. It’s also what allows us to immediately adjust our demeanor when suddenly encountering friend or foe in the wild.

While these traits should be characteristic of every baptized person, women in fact live them with particular intensity and naturalness. In this way, women play a role of maximum importance in the Church’s life by recalling these dispositions to all the baptized and contributing in a unique way to showing the true face of the Church, spouse of Christ and mother of believers...

He never abandoned his family or started over with someone else. Even your mother appreciated that he didn’t ‘drink, whore, or gamble’ like his father. Your story, though, ends with you, Elsa. No one will suppress or reject the traits they inherit from you.

I have great, wild hopes of finding my daughter as she will be in adulthood, when she nominally stops needing me, when she is past the seizures and denunciations that I expect will come at adolescence because they came so brutally for me. I hope that I am right in my interpretation of the organic grandmother, that mother hunger is a primal trait of womanness, and that my daughter's need for me may prove larger, more enduring, more passionate than the child's needs for meals, clothes, shelter and applause. I hope that she needs me enough to show me who she is, to give regular dispatches, her intellectual progeny, and to trust me with their safekeeping. I hope that she likes to barter- Youth and Experience haggling over Notoriety. May she spit fire and leave me gladly but sense in her very hemoglobin that she can find me and rest with me and breathe, safely breathe, if only for the intermission between cycles of anger and disappointment. For as long as they last, my bones, brains, and strength are her birthright, and they may not be much, but they are tenacious by decree, and they’ll comply happily with the customs of dynasty. When Youth comes calling, Experience gets her shovel and digs.

His words, clumsy as they were, touched me deeper than I could express. I meant it—it was not ridiculous. Once I’d thought that love was the sum of its parts, the result of a collection of traits and experiences, like a structure steadily built from bricks layered over bricks. If you collect enough of them, there is love. But that had been a child’s view of the world. The bricks were important, but what they created was more than just a pile of stones. It was the difference between a house and a home. If the building burns down, something is still there that makes it home.

Some of the more salient traits of his lineage appeared to have come to an end with him. He could not have been more different from his father, who had owned every room he had walked into and made everyone in it gravitate around him, and he had nothing in common with his mother, who had probably never spent a day of her life alone. These discrepancies with his parents became even more accentuated after his graduation. He moved back from New England to the city and failed where most of his acquaintances thrived—he was an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover. He, who owed his fortune to tobacco, did not even smoke. Those who accused him of being excessively frugal failed to understand that, in truth, he had no appetites to repress.

But the traits I once deplored are the ones I now appreciate most. My mother possessed a true gift: she had the ability to enjoy herself. She saw the beauty of the world.

But I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother: her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don't hold on to the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mother gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you'll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It's better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You'll have a few bruises and they'll remind you of what happened and that's okay. But after a while the bruises fade, and they fade for a reason- because now it's time to get up to some shit again.

From his earliest days, George Bush was a man who valued courage, loyalty, and service. Those were the traits that his mother and father had instilled in him. And the United States of America, especially its citizens in uniform, embodied those ideals. That was the country that Dad risked everything to defend.

This is the first real food I've had since the patisserie trolley at the Bordeaux airport," Shannon said. She took a bite, and an expression of rapture came over her face. "They'll probably close the borders of France to me for saying this, but I've never had a better quiche lorraine." Tess's mother possessed a combination of Irish charm and whimsy and American directness. According to Tess, these traits had served her well in her profession and maybe in her social life. As a mother, perhaps not so much, judging by what Tess had said. With her auburn hair and English tea rose complexion, Shannon didn't really look like anyone's mother.

Because “cold” mothers exhibit traits (possibly as the result of genetic makeup) similar to those displayed by autistic children, it was at one time thought that distant mothers produced autistic children, but too many “warm” and “loving” mothers produced autistic children for this theory to remain plausible. While

Empaths are born with these traits, and since most of their parents are unaware of why their child is so hypersensitive, they don’t receive any training on how to handle this type of psi ability. They also have very little understanding of or compassion for how overwhelming it must be to feel emotions at such an intense level. Those who don’t experience this kind of feeling have a difficult time understanding or sympathizing with what an empath experiences on a daily basis. When I was a young empath, I could enter a room of people and read the temperature of the room by the energy that everyone was giving off. I could tell if my father was soon to be erupting in anger and when my mother was in a state of high anxiety. The energy would wash over me and enter my auric field, where I would experience the emotions that both were emitting. Because I didn’t know how to release this energy or what to do with it, it would stay in my auric field. I would gather too much and end up with a stomachache. Holidays with large gatherings of family were the most challenging. Invariably, I would be so overwhelmed as I psychically picked up all this energy without releasing it from my physical and aura body that I would become physically ill every Christmas. I would exhibit flu-like symptoms and have an upset stomach to the point of vomiting. My mother would put me in bed, lamenting that she couldn’t understand how I could get so ill every Christmas. Over time, I developed the only coping skill that I subconsciously knew: creating a wall of energy around myself where I did not allow all of my energy to be accessed. I retreated behind the wall, keeping some of my emotional energy safely tucked away and allowing the wall to block some of the intense energy bouncing around me. There were times when the emotional intensity of everyone was so high that I wanted to leave the room. Since I was not always able to escape the situation, I learned how to put up a block around myself so that I wouldn’t have to feel overwhelmed by the energy pinging around me.

Historical experiences of this absolute godliness gave rise to all the scriptures in the world. Hence, the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human society. Faith is a crucial evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping- mechanism.

a being’s moral status or value does not change based on her relative dependence on her mother, a doctor, a spaceship, or anyone or anything else. “Trait

it would be easier to help depressed teens if they were nicer to be around, or more communicative about their thoughts. If only they looked like the kids in the pamphlets do: clean-cut and attractive, staring out a rainy window with a wistful expression, chin propped on a fist! More commonly, though, a disturbed teenager will be unpleasant: aggressive, belligerent, obnoxious, irritable, hostile, lazy, whiny, untrustworthy, sometimes with poor personal hygiene. But the fact that they’re so difficult, so dedicated to pushing us away, does not mean they do not need help. In fact, these traits may be signals that they do.

I remember a television program I saw once... The program was a documentary, about one of those wars. They interviewed people and showed clips from films of the time, black and white, and still photos... The interviews with people still alive then were in colour. The one I remember best was with a woman who had been the mistress of a man who had supervised one of the camps where they put the Jews, before they killed them. In ovens, my mother said... From what they said, the man had been cruel and brutal... The woman said she didn't notice much that she found unusual. She denied knowing about the ovens. ...He was not a monster, she said. People say he was a monster, but he was not one. What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit for little pieces of raw steak. How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation. A big child, she would have said to herself. Her heart would have melted, she'd have smoothed the hair back from his forehead, kissed him on the ear, and not just to get something out of him either. The instinct to soothe, to make it better. There there, she'd say, as he woke from a nightmare. Things are so hard for you. All this she would have believed, because otherwise how could she have kept on living? She was very ordinary, under that beauty. She believed in decency, she was nice to the Jewish maid, or nice enough, nicer than she needed to be. Several days after this interview with her was filmed, she killed herself. It said that, right on television. Nobody asked her whether or not she had loved him. What I remember now, most of all, is the makeup.

Character traits of Jesus will give birth to beautiful features of life in the Age to Come. When Jesus returns, He will conquer His enemies. Justice will roll down like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:24). Then, Zechariah 9:10 tells us that Jesus will remove chariots, warhorses, and battle bows. In other words, He will establish peace to the ends of the world and be known as the Prince of Peace. The King will comfort His people as a mother comforts her child, and He will establish a government of peace that exists to nurture its people (Isa. 9:6; 66:13; Rev. 21:4).

American eugenicists wanted to prevent people with bad traits from having children. Some argued for institutionalizing the feebleminded to stop them from having sex. Some called for sterilization. In 1900, an American physician named W. D. McKim went so far as to call for “a gentle painless death.” He envisioned the construction of gas chambers to kill “the very weak and the very vicious.” It would be pointless to try to improve these people through experience, because, McKim declared, “heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness.

For three centuries, Black mothers have been thought to pass down to their offspring the traits that marked them as inferior to any white person. Along with this biological impairment, it is believed that Black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to their children that dooms each succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair. A persistent objective of American social policy has been to monitor and restrain this corrupting tendency of Black motherhood. Regulating

there was one other important trait that would prove to be problematic for the breeding interests of the gods: Nephilim were large, very large. A mature Naphil could reach heights of seven, eight or even nine cubits tall. The Nephilim were giants. The fetus therefore was manifestly huge and tended to stretch a woman’s womb cavity to its limits. For this reason, a Naphil could not be born in a human way. It would have to rip its way out of its mother, killing her in the process. This was all very natural for its kind, since the dead mother would be the newborn’s first meal.

I haven’t made anyone my hyena to call yet, Kane, did you remember that? One of the things I learned from the Mother of All Darkness was how to break the bonds between vampires and their servants. I could just take you from Asher, bind you to me, and thanks to the ardeur I would be your exception, Kane. You’d fuck me, because you’d crave me like a drug.” “No . . . lies.” “Oh, I’m not lying. Why tell a lie when the truth is so much more terrible?” “Bitch.” “Oh, Kane, you can do better than that.” “He’ll never . . . top you . . . again if you hurt me.” “Narcissus is going to kill Asher if he can, so he won’t be topping, or fucking, anyone.” “He loves Asher.” “You know, I think he does, but Asher never loves the people who love him the most; he always chases the ones who don’t want him, haven’t you figured that out yet?” “He loves me enough to . . . do this.” I nodded. “Yes, he does, because in you he’s finally found someone more problematic, more jealous, more of a shit, than he is—it’s only taken him six, seven hundred years to find someone who exemplifies his own worst traits. He’ll keep you close, Kane, I don’t know why, but he sees something in you he wants.” Kane swallowed, and his eyes were able to look at mine again. I got up still nude and left him lying on the floor with my towel curled up beside him. “You and Asher deserve each other, Kane, you really do.

Those were the traits that his mother and father had instilled in him. And the United States of America, especially its citizens in uniform, embodied those ideals. That was the country that Dad risked everything to defend. And that was the country he would one day lead.

Have ye made her your mate yet?” Cathal looked up from his work to frown at Jankyn even as the man strode across the ledger room to stand before his worktable, his hands on his hips. “Why would ye ask me that?” “I happened to get a good look at your bride’s wee, bonnie neck a week ago as ye fought with Edmee. No mark. We may heal from a bite without a scar, but an Outsider cannae. Your mother wore your father’s mark. Proudly. Do ye nay feel the need or are ye ashamed of it, try to deny it?” “The need is there,” confessed Cathal, “although I had hoped it was one of the MacNachton traits I didnae inherit from my father. As ye ken weel, every halfling is different in what remains, what weakens, and what disappears. I am nay ashamed of it, however. I but worry about how Bridget will react to it. Cowardice has held my tongue, but I must gird my wee loins and tell her soon. The need grows too strong.” Jankyn

She kept her voice gentle and her eyes down, for without such softening traits, Haejung's mother had often said, a woman's presence would be like a thorn and not a flower.

As you know, males are attracted to beautiful females, but what you may not know is that what males call “beautiful” represents the physical traits that show suitability for motherhood. The females who have historically been the most suitable mothers were (1) healthy, (2) old enough to be sexually mature, (3) yet still young so they lived long enough to give birth and raise their offspring.

places, Ramsay . . . Ramsay . . . Ramsay . . . the last frail repeat fading into nothing. He was the more reserved of the two dogs and it had taken longer to gain his trust. Fair or not, he was her favorite because of it. Sadie had always been wary of easy affection. It was a trait she’d also recognized in Nancy Bailey, Maggie’s mother; one she suspected had brought them closer together. A folie à deux it was called, a shared madness, two otherwise sane people encouraging each other in the same delusion. Sadie could

The character traits and mentalities that were formed in response to one or two central actors of childhood becomes the habitual templates for interpreting pretty much anyone. The always jokey and slightly manic way of being that we evolved so as to keep a depressed, listless mother engaged becomes our second nature. Even when she is long gone, we remain people who need to shine at every meeting, who require a partner to be continually focused on us and who cannot listen to negative or dispiriting information of any kind. We are living the wide open present through the narrow drama of the past.

I've been able to see colors around people and objects my whole life long. Through my eyes, colors drifted around people, like softly falling snow, offering glimpses of personalities. Floaters, I called them. It had taken me years to figure out the language of the colors, their meaning. Take Alice, for example. Orange floated around her, telling me of her playful, energetic personality. But after my car accident, other colors, secondary colors, had become sharper, clearer, louder. They were emotional colors and were nearly impossible to ignore. After Mabel had knocked me down, around Alice there had been sparks of dark plum. Remorse. "Were you able to see her personality?" Glory asked, her thin eyebrows raised high. Only close family knew how I could see color---it was too hard, too strange, to explain to others. However, my abilities weren't the least bit odd to Glory, who knew where to plant a flower seed simply by looking at it, or to my mother, who had never been lost a day in her life because she instinctively knew which direction to go. We came from a long line of people who had enhanced intuitions connected to nature.

To wonder how homosexual behavior could have evolved is the wrong approach. It buys into a doubtful dichotomy unsupported by what we know about genetics as well as actual human behavior. To my mind, the better question is whether we should be surprised that humans and other animals regularly engage in sexual activities that can’t possibly lead to reproduction. Does evolutionary theory allow for such an opening up of sexual possibilities? Of course it does. The animal kingdom is chock full of traits that evolved for one reason but are also used for others. The hooves of ungulates are adapted to run on hard surfaces, but they also deliver a mean kick to pursuers. The primate hand evolved to grasp branches, but it also allows infants to cling to their mothers, which is a smart thing to do high up in the trees. The mouths of fish are for feeding, but they also serve as holding pens for the fry of mouth-breeding cichlids. Color vision is thought to have come about because our fruit-picking primate ancestors needed to judge the ripeness of their food. But once we perceived color, this capacity became available for reading maps, noticing someone’s blushing, or finding shoes that match our blouse.

Research into human beings show that girls with the highest oestrogen levels seem to be at an intellectual disadvantage, while boyish girls do particularly well in the field of spatial skills - the traditional area of male advantage. There is growing support for the belief that girls with male character traits such as aggression, independence, self-confidence and assertion tend to achieve higher academic success than the norm for their sex. Teenage girls whose mothers rooo male hormones during pregnancy have higher overall IQs, and are more likely to pass university extramce examsinations. They also seem to be disproportionately interested, for their sex, in science subjects.

Mothers not only pass the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on to their fetuses but on to even more distant generations. When a mother is exposed to EDCs, so too are her fetus's germ cells, which develop into eggs or sperm. "It's thought that during that exposure, the chemical can target those germ cells and do what we call reprogramming, or making epigenetic changes," says Flaws. "That can be a permanent change that gets carried through generations, because those germ cells will eventually be used to make the next generation, and those fetuses will have abnormal germ cells that would then go on to make the next generation." In the mid-20th century, scientists documented this in women who took a synthetic form of estrogen, called diethylstilbestrol or DES, to prevent miscarriages.? The drug worked as intended, and the women gave birth to healthy babies. But once some of those children hit puberty, the girls developed vaginal and breast cancer. The boys developed testicular cancer, and some suffered abnormal development of the penis. Scientists called them DES daughters and sons. "When those DES daughters and sons had children, we now have DES granddaughters and grandsons, and a lot of them have increased risk of those same cancers and reproductive problems," says Flaws. "Even though it was their great-grandmother that took DES and they don't have any DES in their system-their germ cells have been reprogramming, and they're passing down some of these disease traits." And now toxicologists are gathering evidence that mothers are passing microplastics and nanoplastics complete with EDCs and other toxic substances- to their fetuses. In 2021, scientists announced that they'd found microplastics in human placentas for the first time, both on the fetal side and maternal side.Later that year, another team of researchers found the same, and they also tested meconium-a newborn's first feces and discovered microplastic there too. Children are consuming microplastics, then, before they're even born.

The major difference shows up when these monkeys are highly stressed (overaroused) for a long time. Then, compared to other monkeys, these more reactive monkeys seem anxious, depressed, and compulsive. If repeatedly upset, they show these behaviors more often, and at this point their neurotransmitters decrease. These behaviors and physical changes also show up in any monkey traumatized in childhood by being separated from its mother. Interestingly when first traumatized, what increases are the stress hormones like cortisol. But again, with time, especially with other stressors, like being isolated, the serotonin levels decline. Then the monkeys are permanently more reactive. The point to be realized from these two studies is that what creates the problem is chronic overarousal or stress or trauma in childhood—not the inherited trait. We saw the same point in chapter 2. Sensitive children experience more brief moments of arousal, with its increased adrenaline, but they’re fine if feeling secure. But when a sensitive child is insecure (or when any child is), short-term arousal turns to long-term arousal, with its increased cortisol. Eventually, serotonin is used up, too (according to the studies with monkeys). This research is important for HSPs. It makes very concrete why we need to avoid chronic overarousal. If our childhood programmed us to be threatened by everything, then we must do the inner work, usually in therapy, that will change that programming even if it takes years. Kramer cites evidence that a permanent susceptibility to overarousal and depression can develop and real harm can be done if serotonin levels are not returned to normal. So we want to stay secure, rested, and serotonin-strong. This keeps us ready to enjoy our trait’s advantages, the appreciation of the subtle. It means that the inevitable moments of overarousal do not lead to increased cortisol over days and decreased serotonin over months and years. If we have blown it, then we can still correct the situation. But it takes time, and we may want to use medication for a while to help make this correction.

1. How much did you know about the culture Julia Haart grew up in before you read the book? What were some things that surprised you? 2. Religions come with many rules. What do you think religious rules provide for followers? 3. Talk about the role of women in the cloistered community. What are their responsibilities? Are the ideal standards to which they are held consistent with their realities? What other faiths tout similar views? 4. Julia has a very complicated view of her mother. How do you think that this informs her own role as a mother to four children? What example do you think her journey sets for them? 5. What traits from her upbringing, if any, do you think Julia has brought with her to her new life? 6. Have you ever experienced a situation in which you had to set boundaries or leave behind a group in order to be true to yourself? What feelings did you have surrounding that? What was the result? 7. Julia references many of the difficulties that some people who leave her former community face. How do you think her assertion that the community “forced them to be unprepared for modernity” ultimately serves to ensure its continuity? 8. Ultra-Orthodox Jews cite modesty and simplicity as the foundation of their values, yet Julia describes the high costs associated with following the community’s strict traditions and customs. How does this materialism conflict with the community’s values? How is it similar to materialism in the secular world? 9. Discuss your reaction to the fact that Julia was not born into ultra-Orthodox Judaism. How do you think her life might have been different if her mother and father had not converted? 10. Toward the end of the book, Julia states, “Every time I win, it makes me stronger and more able to handle the next attack that comes my way…. Now I listen to my own voice.” In what other ways has Julia demonstrated that same resolve throughout her life? 11. Seven years after leaving behind her community, Julia says she feels closer to a higher power than she ever did when she was religious. What does her memoir say about religion versus spirituality? 12. The memoir takes place in the period before My Unorthodox Life aired on Netflix in 2021. Did you watch the show before you read Brazen? What surprised you about Julia’s story that wasn’t addressed in the show? Did learning more of her backstory from the book change your understanding of Julia’s life on screen in any way? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Julia Haart is the CEO, co-owner, and chief creative officer of Elite World Group.

Heritability is one of the trickiest concepts in modern biology. It describes variations only across an entire population. If the heritability of a trait in a group of people is 50 percent, that doesn’t mean that in any given person, genes and environment are each responsible for half of it. And if a trait has a heritability of zero, that doesn’t mean that genes have nothing to do with it. The heritability of the number of eyes is zero, because children are virtually all born with a pair of them. When we walk down the street, we don’t pass someone with five eyes, another with eight, and another with thirty-one. If someone has only one eye, it’s probably because they lost the other one in an accident or from an infection. Yet we all inherit a genetic program that guides the development of eyes.

Scientists developed twin studies as a way to study human DNA in an age when it was impossible to examine it directly. Once it became possible to read genetic markers in people’s genomes, new ways emerged to measure heritability. Peter Visscher and his colleagues found that pairs of siblings can vary tremendously in their genetic similarity, sharing as little as 30 percent of their genetic variants in common to as much as 64 percent. If a trait is highly heritable, Visscher reasoned, then it should be more similar in siblings who have more DNA in common. In 2007, Visscher and his colleagues examined the height of 11,214 pairs of regular siblings. They found that “twin-like” siblings—those who shared more than half of their DNA—tended to grow to more similar heights. Siblings with less genetic similarity were not so similar. The scientists used these correlations to calculate the heritability of height. They ended up with an estimate of 86 percent. That’s an exceptionally high figure. Nicotine dependence has a heritability of 60 percent. The age at which women go into menopause is 47 percent. Left-handedness is at a mere 26 percent. In the world of heritability, height stands tall. —

I hope that I’m right in my interpretation of the organic grandmother, that mother hunger is a primal trait of womanness, and that my daughter’s need for me may prove larger, more enduring, and more passionate than the child’s need for meals, clothes, shelter, and applause.

Our children are not “something bad or unpleasant we are being subjected to,” to borrow from the above definition of suffering. And yet when we view dealing with their more challenging traits as suffering rather than as a hard-but-good opportunity to grow in Christlikeness, we gravitate toward a Motherhood of Martyrdom—an attitude sure to bleed into the way we treat our families.

You may be wondering why Mother Nature would program this variability across people. As a social species, should we not all be synchronized and therefore awake at the same time to promote maximal human interactions? Perhaps not. As we’ll discover later in this book, humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake timing preferences can be understood. The night owls in the group would not be going to sleep until one or two a.m., and not waking until nine or ten a.m. The morning larks, on the other hand, would have retired for the night at nine p.m. and woken at five a.m. Consequently, the group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable (i.e., every person asleep) for just four rather than eight hours, despite everyone still getting the chance for eight hours of sleep. That’s potentially a 50 percent increase in survival fitness. Mother Nature would never pass on a biological trait—here, the useful variability in when individuals within a collective tribe go to sleep and wake up—that could enhance the survival safety and thus fitness of a species by this amount. And so she hasn’t.

Career: What kind of work do you find valuable? What kind of person do you want to be in your work? Leisure activity: What activities do you find relaxing or rejuvenating? What hobbies bring you joy? Caregiving: How important is it for you to care for and inspire others? Family: What type of sister, mother, daughter do you want to be? What sorts of relationships do you want to build with your immediate family? Your extended family? Your in-laws? Intimate relationships: What kind of partner do you want to be? What kind of relationship would you like to build? Who is the ideal you in your relationship? Community involvement: Would you like to contribute to political, social, environmental, or other community causes? What kind of position do you wish to occupy within your community? Religion and spirituality: What form of spirituality, if any, matters to you? What role do you want religion or spirituality to play in your life? How would you describe your ideal self in regard to your spirituality? Education and personal development: What education or skills do you most value? How important is ongoing education, and what role do you want it to play in your life? Health: How do you approach mental and physical fitness? What kind of relationship do you wish to have with food, exercise, sleep, substances, and intellectual pursuits? Friends: What qualities do you want to bring to your friendships? What kinds of friendships do you want to build? Other: What is missing from this list that is vital to a meaningful life? How do you want to enact this value in your life?

Isaac was a sociopath, and all sociopaths, be they Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer, or Jenna's own mother, shared certain traits. One of those traits: they always played by their own rules, rules that set double standards—one standard for only them, and another standard for everyone else.

A belief among Chinese mothers is that children pick their own traits in the womb. The smart ones work diligently to pick the better traits. The dumb

at the vanity to let the droid do her work. As she stared at her reflection in the mirror, she remembered how, as a little girl, she used to look for proof that she resembled her parents in some way. Although Leia had always known herself to be adopted, had realized any shared traits would be only a coincidence, she had still hoped to see a little of her mother’s wisdom and beauty, or some of the kindness she had once found so easily in her father’s eyes.

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

This habit of emailing authors when they make you feel something is one of the best traits my mother has passed down to me.

trait and very wisely makes no issue of it. Some men know that they are being influenced by the women of their choice—their wives, sweethearts, mothers or sisters—but they tactfully refrain from rebelling against the influence because they are intelligent enough to know that no man is happy or complete without the modifying influence of the right woman. The man who does not recognize this important truth deprives himself of the power which has done more to help men achieve success than all other forces combined.

Not that living with her was any walk in the park. Her mood swings were fierce, and she was prone to savage dreams, often waking him up with her sleep talk, semicoherent tear-choked pleas to be left alone. And what he at first thought was a temporary desire for a protector in her life had over the years morphed into a river of visceral, mostly inarticulate need for him, a neediness her never quite understood but responded to with everything he had. She could never wear him out with her demands, there was something about her that made him want to be the best possible version of himself. He loved her, loved to come through for her, loved that what he had always thought of with embarrassment as his flatline personality, his bland stolidness, could become the rock in the raging sea of another soul's life. Still, there was something inside her he could never quite get at. Sometimes he felt like a knight assigned to protect a maiden from a dragon that only she could see, and so he paid attention to the words she cried out in her sleep, when her half-panicked rants became less coherent and maybe closer to the bone, but he was not a particularly analytical individual, so all his secret studying came to nothing. And given that he had been raised in a home in which he'd been taught to take people as they were, no questions asked, a home in which the character trait prized above all else was an Apache level of forbearance, he would die before straight up asking his wife of tweleve years, the mother of his two sons, Who Are You.

To protect her son, Shishupala’s mother gets from Krishna a boon that he will forgive a hundred crimes of her son. But she does not bother to warn her son never to commit a crime. Thus Vyasa draws attention to a peculiar human trait of trying to solve a problem through external means without bringing about any internal transformation.

More commonly, though, a disturbed teenager will be unpleasant: aggressive, belligerent, obnoxious, irritable, hostile, lazy, whiny, untrustworthy, sometimes with poor personal hygiene. But the fact that they’re so difficult, so dedicated to pushing us away, does not mean they do not need help. In fact, these traits may be signals that they do.

What Mrs. Brindle doesn’t do that is routine for middleclass mothers is view her daughter’s interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie’s interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter’s talent. Instead she frames Katie’s skills and interests as character traits—singing and acting are part of what makes Katie "Katie." She sees the shows her daughter puts on as "cute" and as a way for Katie to "get attention.

Sadly, I see this in my sister, too. DeAnna is strong, beautiful, and far smarter than I will ever be, but she doesn’t view herself in that light; she always feels that she’s just not quite enough. And now I have a young adult daughter who is the same way. It must be genetic, this trait that my grandmother passed to my mother and my mother to my sister. It somehow missed me, but it passed through to my daughter. All four, stunningly beautiful women, are differently gifted but ingenious, and none see themselves in that way.

way to the quarry and picked out a stone he liked. He had brought it back on a borrowed pony two days later. But people forgave him his transgressions, partly because he was a truly exceptional stonecarver, and partly because he was so likeable – a trait he definitely had not inherited from his mother, in Philip’s opinion. Philip had given some thought to what Jack would

All of their fathers worked at the local plant and many of their mothers worked odd jobs as waitresses or secretaries. Their houses were small and decrepit. The rooms were full of outdated appliances and secondhand knickknacks, their parents fearful of parting with anything of potential future worth. They’d been taught to repurpose things. Frugality reigned supreme. Survival was their religion. The ability to get through another day was the only trait passed down.

Agreeable, compassionate, empathic, conflict-averse people (all those traits group together) let people walk on them, and they get bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and cannot comprehend why that is not reciprocated. Agreeable people are compliant, and this robs them of their independence. The danger associated with this can be amplified by high trait neuroticism. Agreeable people will go along with whoever makes a suggestion, instead of insisting, at least sometimes, on their own way. So, they lose their way, and become indecisive and too easily swayed. If they are, in addition, easily frightened and hurt, they have even less reason to strike out on their own, as doing so exposes them to threat and danger (at least in the short term). That’s the pathway to dependent personality disorder, technically speaking.198 It might be regarded as the polar opposite of antisocial personality disorder, the set of traits characteristic of delinquency in childhood and adolescence and criminality in adulthood. It would be lovely if the opposite of a criminal was a saint—but it’s not the case. The opposite of a criminal is an Oedipal mother, which is its own type of criminal.

Montaigne was a French courtier who retired from political life in 1571 to sit in a castle tower and reflect on vanity and happiness, on liars and friendship. While he found comfort in this solitude, pain intruded on his contemplation from time to time, thanks to his kidney stones. One day, Montaigne transformed the stones into grist for an essay. “It is likely I inherited the gravel from my father,” Montaigne guessed, “for he died sadly afflicted by a large stone in the bladder.” Yet Montaigne had no idea how one could inherit a disease, as opposed to a crown or a farm. His father had been in perfect health when Montaigne was born, and remained so for another twenty-five years. Only in his late sixties did his kidney stones first appear, and they then tormented him for the last seven years of his life. “While he was still so remote from the disease, how could the light trifle of his substance out of which he built me convey so deep an impress?” Montaigne wondered. “Where could the propensity have been brooding all this while?” Simply musing in this way was a visionary act. No one in Montaigne’s day thought of traits as being distinct things that could travel down through generations. People did not reproduce; they were engendered. Life unfolded as reliably as the rising of bread or the fermenting of wine. Montaigne’s doctors did not picture a propensity lurking in parents and then being reproduced in their children. A trait could not disappear and be rediscovered, like a hidden letter. Doctors did sometimes observe certain diseases that were common in certain families. But they didn’t think very much about why that was so. Many simply turned to the Bible for guidance, citing the passage telling of God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

eugenicists made a mess of traits like intelligence. They were obsessed with splitting people into two categories—healthy and feebleminded—and then they would cast the feebleminded as a “class of vast and dangerous dimensions.” Penrose saw intelligence as a far more complex trait. He likened intelligence to height: In every population, most people were close to average height, but some people were taller and shorter than average. Just being short wasn’t equivalent to having some kind of a height disease. Likewise, people developed a range of different mental aptitudes.

Inspired by these tiny sculptures, a few hyperfeminist mystics deduced a delightfully satisfying ideological fantasy—that an Earth-Mother religion preceded every other spiritual belief system, all over the planet. This ubiquitous Neolithic creed must obviously have worshipped a goddess! One whose top traits were fecundity and serene maternal kindliness. That is, till gentle Gaia was toppled by violent bands of macho Jehovah-Zeus-Shiva followers, spurred by an abrupt wave of vile new technologies—metallurgy, agriculture, and literacy—that arrived with concurrent and destabilizing suddenness, all at once shaking the tranquil old ways and toppling the pastoral mother goddess.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, eugenics had begun taking root in the United States, and there it flowered into darker blooms. American eugenicists wanted to prevent people with bad traits from having children. Some argued for institutionalizing the feebleminded to stop them from having sex. Some called for sterilization. In 1900, an American physician named W. D. McKim went so far as to call for “a gentle painless death.” He envisioned the construction of gas chambers to kill “the very weak and the very vicious.” It would be pointless to try to improve these people through experience, because, McKim declared, “heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness.

All the great cat goddesses such as Isis, Bast, Diana and Hecate, with their eternal Moon link, combine woman with Cat. Emphasising this empathy, the mysterious feline has always been construed as woman and vice versa. Since time immemorial, women have been thought to possess an ability as mediums, with a talent for soothsaying and clairvoyance. Second sight, too, is deemed to be a natural female attribute. Cats, silently wise and 'knowing', with eyes reflecting the secrets of time itself, arc said to be 'old souls', and the attraction of woman to Cat could be seen to represent a look back to an ancient part of the human soul. And what woman deep within her Moon-centred self doesn't nurture a fascination with the past — the 'unknown'; ancient, forbidden secrets; and the mystical world of the occult? Perhaps, at some distant point in time, Cat and woman with their beguiling ways and inbuilt urge to procreate underwent a transmigration of souls, each now sharing the ' complex psyche of the other. Both are symbols of fertility; both project innate feminine traits of intuitive sensuality and nurture and cherish their young. The female cat, both domestic and in the wild, is known to be a caring, efficient mother and the old French proverb, Jamais chatte qui a des petits n'a de bans morceaux, (a cat with little ones has never a good mouthful) illustrates the devotion and selflessness of the maternal feline.

Mother's build character. If one is honest or cheat. The traits are beveled by care or ignorance.

HSPs do more of that which makes humans different from other animals: We imagine possibilities. We humans, and HSPs especially, are acutely aware of the past and future. On top of that, if necessity is the mother of invention, HSPs must spend far more time trying to invent solutions to human problems just because they are more sensitive to hunger, cold, insecurity, exhaustion, and illness. Sometimes people with our trait are said to be less happy or less capable of happiness. Of course, we can seem unhappy and moody, at least to non-HSPs, because we spend so much time thinking about things like the meaning of life and death and how complicated everything is—not black-and-white thoughts at all. Since most non-HSPs do not seem to enjoy thinking about such things, they assume we must be unhappy doing all that pondering. And we certainly don’t get any happier having them tell us we are unhappy (by their definition of happy) and that we are a problem for them because we seem unhappy. All those accusations could make anyone unhappy. The point is best made by Aristotle, who supposedly asked, “Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy human?” HSPs prefer the good feeling of being very conscious, very human, even if what we are conscious of is not always cause for rejoicing. The point, however, is not that non-HSPs are pigs! I know someone is going to say I am trying to make an elite out of us. But that would last about five minutes with most HSPs, who would soon feel guilty for feeling superior. I’m just out to encourage us enough to make more of us feel like equals.

Ada had inherited her father’s romantic spirit, a trait that her mother tried to temper by having her tutored in mathematics.

The central figure is Walter Francis White, born in Atlanta in 1893 and raised there as well. Both of Walter’s parents came from enslaved families in Georgia, and while they were African American, they had skin so pale, they and their children could have passed for white. “I am a Negro,” Walter himself explained. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” The family’s complexion represented a shameful truth: that generations of enslaved families were born out of illicit encounters between Black women who had no rights to their bodies and white male slave owners, who had full legal impunity. Walter’s great-grandmother on his mother’s side, in fact, birthed six children in the 1830s, fathered by her owner, William Henry Harrison, who later became president of the United States.

Being forgetful is one of many entries on my mother’s long list of Edie’s Regrettable Personality Traits. They include shyness, a tendency to avoid eye contact in most kinds of social situations, and what my mother calls “a lack of womanly intuition.

She apologises too much but then that is a particularly female trait. We all apologise constantly. Until we can’t apologise anymore.

This was a glorious moment for my mother, who’d won the battle all unhealthy divorcés fight: Which parent will the child ultimately choose? Because they believe that, at their core, children experiencing the sting of their parents’ separation can’t possibly choose both. Someone must be the enemy. And the Lady’s villainous traits were easily hidden compared with schizophrenia like King’s, which is, by nature, not an inconspicuous disease. Personality disorders like my mother’s—with their mania or depression or anxiety—show up as patterns over time, subtle and artful, such that you don’t realize you’re bleeding until decades later, hand to your slit throat, unable to shout in protest.

To cope with my parents, minimize the damage of my mother’s coldness and my father’s absence. I’d never know which parts of me were me, versus the traits I’d inherited, and what the family I’d been born into had done to me—how it had bent and shaped me when I was young and malleable.

The bullets that didn’t hit me still changed me. Though it has gotten better over time, when I was first diagnosed with PTSD, I thought all my behaviors were normal. I’ve often reacted to apparently innocuous things in ways that can seem jarring to those who grow up without the threat of gun violence. Hypervigilance and anxiety are part of how you stay alive in communities where gun violence is a constant, and it took a long time for me to recognize that these traits were my response to trauma. To this day, I can tell you about all the times a gun was in my face, and I’ve never been in a gang, never been involved in criminal activity. And while getting my hair cut by a bullet makes for a good story, it’s unremarkable when we consider the statistical likelihood of gun encounters in America. Likewise, the time a guy tried to rob my mother at an ATM and pointed a gun at me to make her comply is as American and mundane as apple pie. The girls who get woken up by gunfire, who learn that a car doing a slow creep is a reason to get down, who die because they were standing near a crowd where a gunman opened fire all have stories that matter, and they deserve our attention, even as we lose sight of them under the avalanche of coverage that prioritizes everyone but them.

Why did God, the creator give fairies free will and egos like humans on earth? “God gave fairies an ego and mind of their own, so that they can create a self-sustaining world and paradise. It would have had to have been overseen by many people, and creators, if the fairies did not have free-will and egos. It is this set of traits that they use to earth’s advantage, to produce more flowers and grass and trees wherever it is needed. It is able to look after itself, on its own accord without it being dependent on its maker. Do you see?l

Both of you... what traits did you inherit from your mother?" "Oh. Hmm... I think I got all my bad traits from mother. But my fatal flaws are from father. " ...

If you love them, how do you know if they’re the right or wrong person? How can you tell when that love differs from all the rest?” Sitting on the stone ledge, she dipped her chin before deciding on her answer. “You ask yourself this: do they lift you up? Do they protect you and give you strength? Do they support your ambitions? Do they respect your opinions and treat you as an equal? A person can love you back, but if they don’t offer these basic essentials, how can love grow? My mother always told me that the heart of a man is revealed by not just what he’s willing to give but also what he’s willing to give up.” “Your mom sounds like a wise woman.” “She is.” Hope’s eyes were brimming with love. “I used to think she was talking about vices like smoking or gambling. She meant giving up things like pride, expectations, or negative traits that make a person weak. Money and promises mean nothing if they come from a man who wants to control you. Tak is my protector, but he doesn’t fight my battles. Even if it means swallowing his pride. Instead, he cheers me on. In return, I do the same.

Once I’d thought that love was the sum of its parts, the result of a collection of traits and experiences, like a structure steadily built from bricks layered over bricks. If you collect enough of them, there is love. But that had been a child’s view of the world. The bricks were important, but what they created was more than just a pile of stones. It was the difference between a house and a home. If the building burns down, something is still there that makes it home.

one twin pair came close to that. They were born in 1933 in Trinidad to a German Catholic mother and a Jewish father; when the boys were six months of age, the parents separated; the mother returned to Germany with one son, and the other remained in Trinidad with the father. The latter was raised there and in Israel as Jack Yufe, an observant Jew whose first language was Yiddish. The other, Oskar Stohr, was raised in Germany as a Hitler Youth zealot. Reunited and studied by Bouchard, they warily got to know each other, discovering numerous shared behavioral and personality traits including . . . flushing the toilet before use.

In the attic, the three discovered an entire rack of evening gowns representing every fashion trend of the twentieth century. Brigid chose a strapless black cocktail dress that Sadie had worn. Phoebe found a flowing white Halston that Flora purchased back in the seventies. And Sibyl chose a gold-beaded flapper dress that had belonged to her great-great-grandmother, Rose. Liam sent a car to fetch them for the party. Gathered in the foyer, it was the first time they saw each other in their formal wear. Brigid's eyes were smoky and lips scarlet. Her red hair fell over her bare shoulders, where blue veins were just visible beneath violet-tinged skin. Phoebe's skin glowed with no assistance from makeup, and she wore her hair in a crown of braids woven through with a golden ribbon. Sibyl was where all the Duncans traits met. She was light and dark, glamorous and natural. Her red curls formed a bloom around her lovely face. The Three looked, very much, like a trio.

I imagine Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist. She is becoming a ghostly outline, a hallow shell, that he feels compelled to fill with bogus details and fabricated character traits, as though false memories are better than none at all.