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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
before I go any further I want to remind you that these benefits are private, this
is union. They have a certain philosophy. The philosophy is that these benefits I’m about to
show you should have been taken care of a long time ago (SMILE), and if you don’t
already have these benefits, get them taken care of now, because number 1 you need them,
and number 2 if you do not get this done now, you will never do it. So as I go through these
benefits, if you see the need for them, they ask you to take advantage today and get
enrolled. Either way, we’ll fill out the report card and that lets the union know I met with
you and went over everything. Now just because some of the people you know got in, it
doesn’t mean you automatically do, you have to qualify. So now I’ll ask you the
pre-qualifying questions to see if I can even go any further
As their name suggests, hybrid cars are a combination of two types of vehicles - electric cars
and traditional gasoline-powered cars, also
known as internal combustion engine vehicles.
A hybrid car has a combustion engine that runs on gasoline and an
electric motor with an attached rechargeable battery pack for electric-powered driving.
Hybrids can use both engines at the same time to increase power or rely on one depending on the driving type.
There are two types of hybrid cars: standard hybrids and plug-in hybrids. Hybrids can use both engines at the same time to increase
power or rely on one depending on the driving type.
Typically, hybrids have lower battery ranges than all-electric vehicles
and the electrical capacity is designed more to supplement gasoline driving and to help maximize fuel efficiency. Some hybrids offer an
electric-only driving mode. Which may only be available for low speeds and/or short ranges.
Many hybrids automatically draw power
only from the electric motor below certain speeds.
This is why they are often much more efficient in city driving
conditions. Hybrids are sometimes seen as an intermediary option in the transition away from
fossil fuels and towards more renewable energy sources.
As a company, we constantly strive to improve our products, as well as our customer satisfaction. In that spirit, we are looking to implement one of two possible plans to ensure that these objectives being met. One plan is to form a company review committee consisting of production managers, product-line workers, inspectors, and a consultant in quality control. This council would brainstorm ways to increase the quality of production and inspection methods. The committee could also make suggestions on the steps necessary to achieve the desired results through new training methods and the purchase of additional equipment. A possible timeline would begin with the committee convening early in September to draft ideas for accomplishing the plans. The committee could meet again in October to report back to their findings and decide upon new procedures for our manufacturing and inspection. Their recommended changes could be implemented in November. Once the changes are made, a future meeting could be scheduled to determine whether or not the changes are effective. At that time, we might want to establish the committee as part of our company. They could meet every month or so to ensure that we are maintaining the highest standard in the quality of our products and the satisfaction of our customers. If necessary, we could maintain the consultant or hire a full-time quality-control person to see that the recommendations of the committee are implemented promptly and effectively. An alternative plan calls for a select committee of executives to survey methods for quality control at companies most similar to our own. Such companies could included Ajax Manufacturing, the Leviathan Corporation and Olympus Industries. Under this plan, the
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Return of the Rejected Self
We also avoid facing ourselves by attributing the truths of our lives to other people. We attribute our desires to them and wait for them to act on these wishes, which we deny as our own. For instance, a man entered his therapy session saying, “I don’t know what to work on.”
“Okay,” I replied. I waited.
Fidgeting in his chair, he blurted out, “What do you think I should work on?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you must have an idea.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You came, right?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And obviously you wouldn’t come here for no reason.”
“Yes, but I don’t know what to work on.”
“So a man without a psychological problem comes to a psychotherapist’s office.”
He squirmed in his chair, sighed, and admitted, “Well, my wife wants a divorce. I suppose you think I should look at that.”
“Only you can know if you should look at your divorce.”
With a heavy sigh, he said, “If I don’t, she’ll leave, and I don’t want that.”
Until we perceive the desires in our hearts, we see them in the hearts of others. This man did not relate to me. He interacted with his wish, which he relocated in me. Then he opposed or distanced himself from my wish for his therapy.
As long as he warded off his feelings by wishing them away into me, he could never feel, face, or see what was in himself. Since he thought that I wanted him to work in therapy, he could not see what he wanted to work on. Rather than face the desire within himself, he examined the one he imagined in me.
For a while, this strategy works: other people appear to have our feelings and desires. Then life happens. A loved one leaves us, a boss criticizes our work, or a child gives us a dose of snark, and the feelings we reject rush back in with a vengeance. Why?
The feelings we reject travel temporarily to other people but only in our imagination. In fact, they live within ourselves.
We can project our inner life onto other people or onto objects. For instance, one man saw eyes in the bushes and trees gazing upon him wherever he walked. The hallucinated eyes satisfied his wish to be seen and known by a remote mother who abandoned him during his first year of life. So much longing and heartbreak was located in the branches above him.
Whenever we reject our feelings, we send them away through projection, asking them to live in other people. When life happens or we are near those we project upon, we feel the feelings we believed were in those people. It’s as if our feelings migrate home after living in other humans.
The man who said he didn’t know what to work on was anxious. He wondered what I wanted from him, never realizing that he was reacting to his desire, which he imagined was in me. My presence roused his disavowed wish within himself. He thought I made him feel when my presence triggered his feelings and desires, the missing pieces, that were trying to make him whole again.
In fact, no one can return our feelings to us since those feelings never leave; their “travel” is only in our imagination. After we stop fantasizing about imaginary feelings and desires in people, we accept the feelings that we believed were outside but that were actually inside, within ourselves.
Life triggers our disavowed feelings, and anxiety is its messenger. Anxiety is the sound of those feelings knocking on our heart’s door: a sad child, an angry kid, or a hopeless one asking, “Can I come in? Will you love me?”
Instead, we reject the feelings arising within and send them to another person. Perhaps it’s a spouse, a child, a friend, or a boss, but we must find somebody to be angry, limited, selfish, or critical: we don’t want to recognize those qualities within ourselves. Having banished our feelings into other people, we distance ourselves from them, analyze them, judge them, and even punish them.
How do we identify the qualities we deny in ourselves and attribute to others? Our judgments, complaints, and habitual beliefs about people are the mirrors in which we can look to see ourselves. The traits we judge in others we reject within ourselves. We complain that others hurt us to avoid facing how we hurt ourselves. We ignore within ourselves what we focus on in others.
What if we get married so we can blame spouses for our problems? A married man invited me to conduct a telepathic therapy with his absent wife: “My wife has a problem with intimacy,” he said.
“Do you notice you invite me to relate to her problems instead of yours?”
“She has issues.”
“That may be, but do you notice you invite me to pay attention to her and not you?”
“Yes.”
“When you invite me to pay attention to her, you ask me to ignore you.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to do that.”
“That’s important. When you invite me to ignore you, we have a problem with intimacy between you and me.”
Examining our complaints gives us the chance to see where the blame belongs: in us. Rather than admit what we have done, however, and study our complaints to discover our inner life, we project our problems onto others. Then we lose sight of what’s inside us by imagining what’s inside them.
The therapist helps our warded-off feelings return home or, more accurately, helps us face the feelings that never left home because they always lived in us. Projections we thought were “not us” were ours all along. We reject our feelings, desires, and urges and imagine we can send them away to live in other people. What if our feelings, longings, and impulses were never bad? Our feelings reach out to give us the information we need.
By rejecting our feelings, we reject ourselves. We project those feelings onto other people. They are angry; they are selfish; they are critical. And we stay away from them or try to control them, never realizing we are trying to control the emotions we pretend are in them.
The destructiveness we see in others is in us. They do not need to be fixed. We should love them rather than try to fix them; doing so will also fix what’s inside us.
Our spouses and others and life itself trigger the feelings we try to avoid within ourselves. We deny those feelings and urges, sending them away, but no matter how far we throw away our feelings, they keep coming back. When we say, “He makes me feel . . . ,” we mean, “He reminds me of what I tried to get rid of in myself.”
Outside the window, tree branches, a blue sky, flowers, and clouds appear. The universe accepts everything. Likewise, everything human is within us: thoughts, feelings, and urges. We try through imagination to send what is inside outside. Then we sense a longing, a longing for what we refused to embrace: the abandoned parts of ourselves.
Can we open our hearts to other people, the abandonarium2 of our rejected feelings, and let the feelings come home, where they have always resided, inside us? When we do, we experience the space we are, the space that holds our inner life.
What Can I Do When I Can Do Nothing?
What better place to put our feelings than in our family members? Where else should we make impossible demands? And why pick anywhere else to fight, when we have so much practice doing it there? Often, “family” conflicts are conflicts with reality.
For instance, a woman we discussed earlier had a conflict with her fifty-year-old son. The father had sexually abused the son as a child. As soon as the mother found out, she sought help, arranging therapy for her son and the family. Sadly, the son did not benefit from therapy; instead, he developed and then nurtured a conviction that his mother had destroyed his life and, further, that she should support him financially, a belief he had bullied her with for thirty years. “My suffering is your fault, and if you don’t support me, I’ll kill myself,” he said. The mother was vulnerable to this threat because she not only felt guilty for the son’s abuse but for her sister’s suicide in her youth.
“He said if I don’t pay, he’ll report me to the licensing board, and I’ll lose my ability to practice law.”
“Which would not work,” I said. “He threatens you, as if you should pay for eternity.” She cried, “I failed him.” I agreed, “Yes, you failed him for a period in childhood, and then you did what you could to the best of your ability. Right?” She recounted how she arranged therapy, admitted her mistakes to him, arranged special tutoring, and put him through college until he dropped out. “He says that his father’s abuse destroyed his life and it’s my fault.”
“Your ex-husband’s abuse traumatized your son. And the way the two of you handled things created problems. That is your responsibility, but for the past thirty years he has made his mistakes, created his misery, and sabotaged his ambitions, career, and marriages. You didn’t do that. He did. You are responsible for whatever mess you created until he was twenty, but he is responsible for the messes he created the past thirty years and the messes he creates today.”
“I thought if I paid for private schools for the grandkids that he would help them, but he lets them skip school, not do homework, and watch television.”
“You thought you could buy their future, but he threw their future and your money down the toilet.”
“I feel like I have to defend myself.”
“No. You are trying to defend a self-image. You loved this image of the perfect mother and gave money to your son, hoping he would restore it, but this wish is a secret vampire that sucks the life out of you. Once you drop this image, what is there to defend? You failed him once as a child. Okay. No need to defend that. It’s true. He must make his life; you can’t do it for him. That’s true. Your actions in the past make it harder for him today.”
“He says I’m trying to buy his forgiveness.”
“And after two hundred thousand dollars over thirty years the evidence is in. You wished your payoffs would buy his forgiveness. They didn’t. He discovered that refusing to forgive you pays very well.”
She burst into laughter, paused, and said, “I tried to tell him he is ruining his children but he doesn’t listen. He either screams at me on the phone or hangs up. I know he’ll call back because he needs money. He has to face reality.”
“No he doesn’t. He hasn’t faced reality for thirty years: he was fired from every job, ruined every relationship, and has been unemployed, refusing to look for work, claiming you should support him in the lifestyle he has become accustomed to. It looks like you have been nominated to be the person who looks at reality.”
“That is true.”
“I can understand that you wish he would face the facts first, but that makes you the hostage of his craziness.”
“I can’t wait any longer. I can’t afford it, but what if he gets enraged with me?”
“He won’t be enraged with you. He is enraged with the facts of life. Once you stop putting your money between him and the facts, he can be enraged with reality as a first step in engaging and facing it.”
Our loved ones can make terrible choices, and we can’t always stop them. Rather than bear the grief inside us, we try to change them to make our pain go away. When we try to change them by sharing insights with them, we provoke rage at worst or perplexity at best. We think we are putting out their fire when we are trying to put out our own, the fire of pain, rage, and loss. We never extinguish a fire in ourselves by pouring our fire on others. The kindest gift we can offer our loved ones is to own our projections and follow the advice we keep giving them.
It is hard to sit in our feelings, so we export them onto others. We try to coerce people into being who we want them to be through explanations, instructions, or demands. The latent message remains the same: “My perception should be your reality!”
Wilting under our wants, people may do what we desire, making us happy when they cave in to our demands. When they don’t, we judge them, tell them they are wrong, and, without their consent, appoint ourselves as their much-needed advisors. Then we are surprised when they are less than delighted by our guidance.
They react with rage because we reject them the way they are. We treat them like home renovation projects in constant need of improvement. We give them the message, “You are almost good enough for me, but first you need to change.”
Other people are not here to become lovable to us, to reject themselves the way we reject them. We are here to love them the way they are, to surrender to what is true: they should be who they are, not how we want them to be. And that surrender might mean that we have to love ourselves when they can’t. Then we set limits. This doesn’t mean we ask them to change their behavior, which we can’t control. We change our behavior, no longer rewarding them when they harm us or our relationship. We face reality while loving them, no longer collaborating with their destructiveness.
This is easier said than done, especially when our hopes are burning in a fire our loved ones set, blow on, and maintain, even if they blame us for setting it and ask us to put it out. The mother had to accept that her son was an arsonist who set his own life on fire, and neither her love nor money would put out his fires when he kept setting new ones.
When loved ones disappoint us, we can let go of the image they didn’t live up to, bear our feelings, and allow life to be revealed as a mysterious gift. Or we can ward off our feelings, cling to our illusions, rebuff the relationship we have, try to buy the one we want, and call these actions “love.”
What if the mother’s disappointment in her son is not a problem but an opportunity? Continual disappointments do not reflect upon others but upon us; they reflect our resistance to what is happening. If you disappoint me once, that is information about you. If you disappoint me dozens of times, that is information about me: my denial of reality. We can’t be repeatedly disappointed unless we keep denying what is true, only to be surprised by its return. By disappointing our wishes, people help us see what is here.
When we embrace our disappointments rather than deny them, we can grieve, letting go of our hopes and fantasies of a family renovation project. To face what is, we must bury our illusions in the boneyard. The mother did not die that day in my office. Her hopeless hopes did. We performed the last rites for the son who used to love her.
She fantasized that money could purchase her son’s love and health, but she could not buy back the life he threw away. Through his actions, he sent her a perverse love note: “Give up. Your love cannot stop my self-destruction.” Constant disappointments crucified her fantasies on the cross of reality.
When she said, “I can’t take it!” I reminded her, “You already did. You’ve taken it for thirty years, but your denial can’t take it, and it is breaking under the strain.” We think we are in charge of what is happening, but life is in charge, and it dissolves the fairy tale of existence being our way instead of the way it is.
We try to push life up to the mountaintop of fantasy, but life rushes back down to the lower world of reality. Life teaches us, and one of its finest instructors is our family. Remember the story of the three little pigs that lived in houses of straw, sticks, and bricks? Whatever is happening challenges the house of thoughts we live in. Devoted to our growth, our family reminds us of what is. Life continues to huff and puff, and we keep clinging to the walls of wishing that already blew down.
When we stop clinging to our fantasies, we can begin to accept and love the family we have, and discover the mystery they are, people whom we thought we knew but really are only coming to know. And even if our family is rotten or evil, loving means we will not deny the truth, and we will let their evil teach us what we need to learn.
When the mother let go of the son she wanted, she started loving the son she had. No longer able to bully his mother, her son had to face the fact that he had no choice but to have a better relationship with her. Why? She no longer joined him in his old destructive dance.
Pushing or Embracing?
When death blows down our dreams, how do we listen? A therapist told me about a woman dying of cancer. The patient’s surgeon nicked a tumor while removing it, spreading cancer cells throughout the patient’s body and leaving her with a fatal prognosis. The therapist told her supervisor, “I’m afraid pushing her for her feelings will be too much for her.” Her supervisor agreed, “This is a deep intuitive truth.” The supervisor’s support left the therapist feeling validated yet troubled, so she raised the question with me: “Do you think her feelings will be too much for her?”
“It’s not possible to push her,” I said. “Cancer and death did that. Have you noticed how cancer and death never knock on the door to ask if they’re too much for us? Life comes whether we are ready or not, but it’s not that we aren’t ready: our illusions aren’t.”
“How do I know whether she can take it?” she asked.
“She already took cancer and death.”
“I see what you mean.”
“It’s not too much for her. She is still here.” I paused. “Is it too much for you?” I waited. She looked at the floor.
“She is dying. You can’t save her. She is enraged with a doctor whose failure killed her. She is losing the life she hoped for—the chance to grow old, to see her children become adults. Will you hold her hand, face her death, and bear these feelings with her?”
“It’s painful.”
“That’s true.”
“You are challenging me.”
“No. Life did that. In fact, life is not challenging you. Life is challenging an image of therapy. You thought your supervisor validated you, but she validated an image of therapy and life with sunlight but no darkness, skies but no clouds, and possession but no loss.”
“I felt she supported me.”
“She supported your wish to run. And all of us want to run from death rather than learn from it. I’m a great runner from life myself, but if you wanted to abandon her, you wouldn’t have brought this up. Because you know this, you won’t let go of her hand when she’s in her deepest need.”
“It’s painful to watch her die, and I can’t do anything.”
“You can’t make her pain go away. You can’t give her life, but by acknowledging her pain, loss, and death, you make it more bearable because the two of you are facing it together.”
“That wasn’t the job description at social services.”
“Therapy isn’t a job, an occupation, or a profession. It’s a calling. Her cancer, her dying, and her suffering are calling out to you. Now you must answer her call, listen to the hand by your side that wants to reach out to hers, and sit beside her while she dies.”
“This is so uncomfortable!”
“Of course. We feel pain too as our dreams for her and the therapy burn up. We can’t save her. Everything goes up in flames, but eventually the fire dies down, and in the ashes, you and she will discover what is left, something you can’t know yet, put into words, or describe. She’ll discover who she is under the words, dreams, and illusions, and so will you.”
We try to push life and death out of ourselves, but they continually embrace us, pushing out the lies. As friends, healers, or therapists, we must embrace death as well—the death of our relationships, our hopes, and our dreams. As we sit with a dying person, we realize we are dying too. By embracing what is, both of us learn who we are under the words in the quiet stillness.
Psychological Cherry-Picking
Rather than face what is, we pick the parts of life that fit our fantasy, reject the rest, and try to live outside reality. We think we are running from the outer world, but we are running from what the outer world evokes: the inner world—our feelings and anxiety. And we never escape from who we are.
The feelings that choose us guide us. Through grief, we face loss and feel love for those who died. When people ignore our boundaries, anger helps us defend ourselves. Fear is not a danger but a signal, alerting us to dangers, internal or external. Thus, feelings are positive, promoting our survival.
Why, then, do we judge feelings as negative? We reject them: “I don’t want to feel this way.” As psychological cherry pickers, we call feelings we want “positive” and feelings we don’t want “negative.” We try to split the world in two, hoping to live in one half and leave the other. We think we should be all good, but we keep being how we are: good and bad.
Since bearing all we feel within ourselves is painful, we try to avoid one half of ourselves. A man who meditated for decades avoided his anger, believing it thwarted his spiritual growth. He claimed, “Anger is unspiritual. Whatever you pay attention to grows, so you should never be angry.” He used meditation techniques to zone out, trying to purify himself of unspiritual feelings. However, skirting his anger turned him into an exploding doormat who appeared passive until he threw tantrums at work.
The psychologist John Welwood has called rage avoidance “spiritual bypassing.”3 We can, and often do, misuse spirituality to sidestep feelings, conflicts, and life. Longing for states of detachment—mislabeled as transcendence—we achieve a form of spiritual divorce. This man tried to transcend his inner life by rejecting it and burying his emotions, not realizing he had planted a seed that would grow from within.
He treated experiences he didn’t want as nonspiritual garbage. Yet just as the air cannot leave the wind, we cannot leave who we are. Feelings and thoughts arise within us and always will. We never escape who we are because we are neither an object nor a location.
Rather than bear our inner life, we try to slice it off. This is not therapy or spiritual practice but psychic self-amputation. As the philosopher Simone Weil reminds us, “Life does not need to mutilate itself to be pure.”4 Yet people mutilate themselves, mistaking a body part for a hated part of their humanity; they hope to recover their purity through self-cutting.
The very idea of purity divorces us from what is true because life includes purity and impurity. By trying to purify himself spiritually, this man attempted to separate himself from his feelings and life to live in an alternate world where anger did not exist.
His self-image, how he thought he ought to be, contradicted the facts: who he was. We push ourselves to become the idealized picture we cherish. This never works because we are reality. The picture of what we should be is fantasy.
If we give up the violence of self-purification, does awareness ever have a problem with whatever arises? Does a mirror reject whatever appears?
Life is not a supermarket where we shop for feelings to put in the cart and leave the discards on the shelf. Why split life in half and discard the rest? In therapy we embrace everything and in the end, we don’t even need to embrace our being since we have always been what we are.
Hunting
Rather than embrace life and ourselves, we engage in cherry-picking or its opposite. One man seized on the most negative facts of his life, turning them over in his mind repeatedly until he suffered from chronic rumination. Obsessed with the worst, he could not see how he created a partial view of the universe or that his negative view, not the universe, caused his suffering. He mistook his rumination, a cherished habit, for a higher form of thought. To counter this, I noted that when we see dog feces on the sidewalk, we manage to walk by rather than pick it up, sniff it, and put it in our pocket. Startled, he stared at me and asked, “Oh, you mean I’m a turd hunter?”
I Have No Blind Spots!
When no longer searching for turds, we hunt for a better truth elsewhere rather than face the truth that is always here. Why don’t we see it? We have blind spots. And since we always have blind spots, we always need others to help us see what we don’t see. For instance, one fellow claimed, “You wouldn’t believe how humble I’ve become!”
Therapy doesn’t eliminate blind spots. It helps us accept our never-ending blindness, so we can welcome feedback from those who see what we cannot. Terrified of our fear, we avoid feedback through illusions and defenses and become blind to the world outside them.
Yet blindness is not only a matter of what we don’t see but also what we want others not to see. Rather than endure the darkness alone, we ask others to join us, to blind themselves by denying what is happening the way we do. Then we can delight in the bliss of mutual blindness: our agreement not to see what we don’t want to see. This never works, for facts do not stop existing when we deny their existence. Through denial, we create our suffering, not seeing how we do it.
For instance, a woman proudly informed me that she had “asserted” herself by calling her husband an asshole.
“You shouldn’t call your husband an asshole.”
“Why not? I’m just being honest.”
“What you call honesty, others would call cruelty. Remember that phrase: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’? I don’t believe that. Words hurt, and I suspect you hurt him when you called him an asshole.”
“He needs to hear the truth.”
“I’m sure he did, for the fact is that you called him a name—asshole. You didn’t care what he felt. And he will remember the truth: you don’t care.”
She believed she had insight into her husband but was blind to the impact of her words, their meaning, and her cruelty. By arguing, she tried to convince me to join her denial and blindness. When I pointed out that he would experience her as cruel and noncaring, she said, “I didn’t mean it that way. He shouldn’t take it personally,” as if meaning could be severed from speech and consequences removed from words. Alas, her contempt did have a consequence: a divorce.
We enter therapy not knowing what causes our problems. We start by saying, “I don’t get it. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, but it’s not working.” We have theories to explain our suffering, but those theories, like, “he’s an asshole,” turn out to be forms of blindness, and because we cherish those theories, we ask others to agree: “Don’t you think he was wrong?”
If our therapists and friends love us, they will not love the lie that blinds us but reveal the truth it hides. If we love them, we suffer the truth they offer and live it. If we love our lie, however, we retaliate by criticizing, trying to push our pain into them: “That’s not true! That’s what you do!”
Since all of us have blind spots, we need others to point them out. And when they help us see what we don’t see, we can do what we could not do before: embrace reality and receive its gifts. Until then we will be blind. Why? We blind ourselves with the lies we tell ourselves.
I Am Another You and Also Not You
Our psychological blindness results from the ways we blind ourselves through defenses. Nothing human is alien to us.5 Yet every defense claims that feelings, thoughts, or desires are alien. We judge people for avoiding their pain through lying, ignoring the fact that we do the same. Or we pretend not to have specific emotions, urges, or problems. The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan reminds us that “we are much more human than otherwise.”6 Each of us suffers the slings and arrows of life, loss, and death and tries to avoid what is.
We deny the humanity in ourselves that we judge in others. For instance, we might say, “The president is arrogant,” “Wealthy people are greedy,” or “Poor people are lazy.” Each of us can be arrogant, greedy, and lazy but we are more comfortable when we imagine that a human trait is not in ourselves but in others we judge. But it’s not true.
Fellow stumblers, deniers, and liars, all of us make mistakes and cause pain to others. These facts are painful to face. Instead, we try to step out of the world of humanity through our powers of imagination and pretend to be superior beings, watching those people, judging them, and rejecting their humanity. Without realizing it, we are judging our own humanity.
Every defense tries to kill our inner life or outer life. Each time we say our grief is silly, our desires are ridiculous, or our anger is ugly, we commit a murder. We can die of a single cut to the wrists or a thousand cuts to the soul, a psychological suicide.
When we meet a person, we find a different heart, a different mind, and a different part of life, which blows down our house of fantasies. In response, we can let go and accommodate life. Or rather than accept a different mind, we may dismiss it, showing contempt, or even entertain the most dangerous fantasy: “If I kill him, I can kill what he thinks.” Every week fanatics try to kill thoughts and feelings by killing people instead.
These killings may be real or symbolic: whether it’s the sarcastic attack of a pundit on a talk show, the wife who screams at her husband, or the father who beats his son, each attack tries to annihilate another person, another opinion, or another part of life. Yet just as we are powerless to stop death, we are powerless to stop life.
The Roman theologian Tertullian lamented two thousand years ago that “the first reaction to the truth is hatred.”7 Hatred tries to make reality disappear, and its constant failure to do so accounts for its violence; hatred always rises as if it only needed to become larger than life to overcome it. Fanatics, killers, and bullies believe they can eradicate an attitude even though the capacity for thought is born again in each child.
Yet in each generation too many children grow up in homes where they must silence their minds. The patient who suffered from psychological tyranny as a child may bring into therapy her childhood of soul murder:8 “Will this therapist ask me to surrender my desire? Will I demand that the therapist surrender her opinions to prove she loves me? Can my mind and the therapist’s mind coexist?” Often this conflict occurs in therapy.
A forty-year-old man consulted me due to problems in his relationships, problems he enacted with me. After I pointed out how his distancing behaviors with me reflected his distant relationships with women, he snapped, “This is a bunch of crap!”
“Do you notice how you are becoming sarcastic with me?”
“So what! I don’t believe a word you are saying.”
“It’s okay with me that you disagree with me. Is it okay with you if I disagree with you?”
He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sure.”
“Obviously we have two points of view. You have yours and I have mine, and that’s as it should be. Two minds in the same room. I assume that’s okay with you?”
“Yes.”
“If it’s okay with you that we disagree, why do the extra work of sarcasm since it’s not necessary?”
Surprised, he said, “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
A few seconds later, he spontaneously described his alcoholic father, a tyrannical, sarcastic, and abusive man who had beaten him. Having been verbally abused by his father, he verbally abused me. His abusive speech, the apparent barrier, was the window to his past suffering. Rather than tell me his history through words, he presented his past through actions.
Bullies browbeat, abusive fathers batter, and fanatics kill, but they never eradicate reality. This man grew up to abuse himself and his loved ones while fearing they would abuse him. As an adult he became an abuser and the abused, perpetuating the pain he suffered as a child.
No matter how much he dismissed himself and me, his inner life always existed, even if it was hidden within his symptom of dismissal. Ever faithful, his anxiety kept pointing to the inner life waiting for his attention. In this sense, no one comes to therapy—our anxiety and symptoms bring us, hoping for the embrace that heals.
We want to get rid of the inner life that lugs us into therapy. Yet our task is to accept and bear how we are. As human beings, I am you, and you are me; we embrace each other as people who stumble, deny, and project. What if we are saved by embracing what we reject in ourselves and attribute to others? When this man saw that I was not his abuser, he realized that he had abused himself and others. As a result, he began to grieve over his losses and faced the rage he felt toward his father. Embracing his inner life, he stopped the abuse and dared to love once again.
People reveal to us other minds, thoughts, and beliefs—ours are not the only ones. Our image of the world doesn’t contain their world, and our image of ourselves doesn’t contain what they see. Our certainty disappears when we realize that our ideas about others describe our beliefs, not their being. The living person cannot be contained in a frozen idea. The man who claimed that what I offered was garbage saw his opinion, not me. He forgot that our reactions and ideas point to what is larger.
When we recognize that the idea of other people as separate and pathological is merely an image, our imaginary separation from the human ends. Until then, we suffer the alienation and loneliness that plagues our lives when we regard others as “not me.”
Can I Pay You to Lie to Me?
To embrace other people, we must face their lies and our own. What if we are asked to lie? A man claimed he didn’t need therapy. Since his friends thought he had a drug problem, he asked me to take his money so he could tell them he was in treatment.
It was a test: Would I offer a lie therapy or a real therapy?
He explained, “I just want to get my friends off my back.”
“They aren’t on your back. The truth is. And they keep pointing it out.”
“If I don’t hear it from them though, I can forget it.”
“You can forget the truth. It doesn’t need you to remember it for it to exist. No matter how far you run, there you are.”
“Look. I’ll show up and pay you. Then I can tell them I’m in therapy.”
“But you won’t be. You’ll be in a pretend therapy.”
“They won’t know.”
“But we will. You ask me to offer a lie therapy we know would not be real. You hope that by buying dishonesty from me, you can buy reality, but it is not for sale.”
He smirked, “I won’t tell anyone. You would be helping me out.”
“I’d be helping your lie, not you. If I sell my integrity to you, I’ll be a useless liar, another fraud in your life.”
“I’ve seen therapists and done rehab before, and they’ve been happy to take my money.”
“If I take your money for what you ask, I would be corrupt, not worthy of your trust. You would have no reason to trust me.”
“Are you saying I should see someone one else?”
“You can find people who will help you lie if you try hard enough, but why hire a liar for a therapist?”
In therapy and life we meet with liars. We must be honest with ourselves that they are lying, and if we help them lie, we are lying to ourselves.
We hope to be healed, yet we fear what could heal us: saying, feeling, and facing the truth. Every one of us lies, and we will not drop our defenses just because a therapist points one out. We let go of them when the therapist is honest and neither colludes with our lies nor disregards our defenses. In a healing relationship we both must be honest.
We don’t ask a liar to be honest. That is our lie, our resistance to facing his lies. The liar asks us to lie to find out if we are trustworthy. And when he lies, we must notice the urgency in his voice or in our hearts, for disappearing beneath the lies, the cries of his former potential become increasingly muffled and finally mute.
Devaluation
Another lie we tell is devaluation. One woman claimed I was useless, my comments were ridiculous, and the therapy was worthless. She devalued me, her close friends, and her family, alienating them and punishing herself with a lifetime of loneliness.
All of us will be devalued. It’s nothing personal about us; it’s something impersonal about the defenses devaluers use. It’s not the hydrant’s fault when the dog lifts his leg, nor is it our fault when people devalue us. People claim we have no value to avoid depending on the value we offer. Through devaluation they ward off the danger of depending upon others. Or people may deny our value to achieve an imaginary victory when they envy our genuine success. Unable to tolerate their envy, they devalue in us what they cannot find within themselves.9
When this woman claimed the therapy was useless, I asked, “Do you notice how you are devaluing me?”
“Are you saying I have to value you?”
“No. You can devalue me. It’s a free country. But as long as you devalue me, you will relate to a worthless therapist and end up with a worthless therapy.”
“This therapy is worthless.”
“I’m glad we are in agreement. As long as you devalue me, this therapy will be worthless.”
“I’m not getting anything out of this therapy.”
“Of course. If you devalue me, you won’t depend upon me, and you won’t get anything out of the therapy. You can keep devaluing me if that works for you, but the therapy will end in failure.”
“Why shouldn’t I devalue you?”
“I’m your therapist, not your toilet.”
“What if your therapy is worthless?”
“Is the therapy worthless or is your devaluation? You can devalue me. I can’t stop you, but then this will become another failed therapy in the graveyard of failed therapies, and we will have to hold the funeral for the life you could have had. Why sabotage your therapy? Why perpetuate your suffering?”
Whenever we invite anyone to form a close relationship with us, our invitation will stir up memories of past relationships. In this woman’s past, the ones she loved had hurt her. My offer of help stirred up mixed feelings: she wanted my actual care and feared my imagined cruelty.
Rather than risk being devalued as she was in the past, she devalued people in the present. She enacted her past: “Since you will abandon and devalue me if I depend on you, I will devalue you first.”
When people devalue us, we may feel angry, as they felt when others devalued them. If we do not recognize this anger, we may turn it on ourselves: “Maybe she’s right: I am not good enough.” Or, intimidated by her, we might submit to devaluation as the patient submitted to her mother: “Since she gets angry when I talk, maybe she will like me if I stay quiet.”
Sigmund Freud called the process of understanding and interpreting these dynamics “working through.”10 But recognizing the intense emotions that get stirred up in this process, the interpersonal analysts suggested we call it “living through.”11 In relationships, we face intense feelings and learn through living. That means we must face devaluation whenever it occurs, whether with a boss, a colleague, or a spouse.
When people devalue us, we might confuse our response of silence with kindness, but accepting devaluation is masochistic submission. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas once said we should never submit to another person because, in doing so, we invite her to sin.12 Continuing to devalue hurts her, and when we accept devaluation, our resulting anger, depression, and despair hurt us. Submitting and retaliating do not help. What should we do? Tell the truth.
Devaluations are not insights but mind droppings. We are not useless; her devaluation is. Ironically, devaluation reveals our worth—what the devaluer envies and cannot tolerate receiving from us. Devaluation starves a person of any healthy human connection. It tries to kill off anything good that triggers envy.
To stop the murder of any relationship, not only therapy, we respond to hatred with strength.13 A person can devalue us if she wants, but we have a choice too: we can part ways rather than collaborate with the cancer of her life. When we no longer defer to her devaluation, she gains a friend, or in this case, a therapist she cannot destroy but can depend on.
When people devalue us, we set limits to keep our relationship from becoming a latrine.14 If we agree with a person’s devaluation, we encourage her to commit a crime: killing a relationship. We should never submit to devaluation, even though life and therapy involve submission. We submit to the truth, not to a lie, and devaluation is a lie told to us.
We Die Once from Death but a Thousand Times from Self-Doubt
Sometimes people devalue us. More often we devalue ourselves. One woman said to me, “I always find fault with myself. I doubt myself all day long.” Her self-doubt was self-hatred masquerading as “higher thought.”
“I want to go to this workshop, but I am not smart enough.”
“Could this be a self-critical thought?”
“What if I don’t have what it takes?”
“Could this be self-doubt?”
“What if I fail?”
“Can we live tomorrow today?”
“No.”
“Notice how you misuse this fantasy of the future to torture yourself today? It’s as if you are saying, ‘Why suffer then when I could suffer now?’”
She chuckled. “I do that a lot.”
“Does this down payment of self-doubt punish you for wanting to leave your boss for a better job?”
She laughed guiltily.
When we doubt ourselves, we refuse to sit with our feelings to discover who will emerge. We preworry, filling the future with fears rather than going into the unknown of who we are.
We go through life with a candle, imagining that the light shows the world when it reveals only a sliver of life. Our true value lies not within the light but in the darkness. Who knows our future? No one. The task is to surrender to and embrace the unknown of ourselves.
Letting go of doubt’s certainty, we realize how it blinded us to our true potential. And as we let go of the lie of self-denigration, feelings open our eyes so we can live the truth formerly hidden under self-doubt.
Gaslighting
Others blind us by asking us to agree with their lies, and we blind ourselves through false beliefs. Rather than admit that we can never plumb the depths of another person, we claim to know them, and that certainty becomes a new blind spot. To know any person, we start by recognizing that we don’t. Not knowing is the precondition for learning about any person. It allows us to open ourselves to the mystery of another person. What happens, though, if we refuse to open ourselves up to other people?
A man consulted me regarding his previous therapist: “She told me my blinking eyes meant I felt murderous rage. Is that true?”
“No. That is mind reading, not therapy,” I replied. Not knowing the depths of another person, we live with risk. We must drop our fantasies to relate to him.
This man continued. “When she told me something negative about myself, and I disagreed, she said this proved I was resisting. If I agreed to an accusation I did not feel was true, I gained her approval. It felt like a Catch-22.”
“It was,” I replied.
By interpreting disagreement as resistance, we can try to bully people into submission and call it “collaboration.” Any fact can be misused to convince people that our projection is real. It’s called “gaslighting” after the famous film15 in which a man conceals and distorts the facts enough to convince his wife that she is going crazy.
Those who try to dominate and control another person do not help him fin
التفكير الإيجابيّ
يُعدّ التفكير الإيجابيّ من المهارات الحياتية التي من الممكن اكتسابها بالتعلم والتدريب والتطوير؛ فالفرد هو الذي يحدد الآليّة التي تنسجم بها أنماط التفكير مع الاستجابات والتصرفات السلوكية، فإذا عاش الفرد في دائرةٍ من الأفكار السلبيّة، فإنّ ذلك سينعكس على حياته وتفاعلاته مع بيئته بشكل مؤكّد؛ فمن الممكن أن يدرّب الإنسان ذاته على التفكير بالأحداث والمؤثرات الجميلة والإيجابية، والابتعاد عن التفكير بالنمط الكئيب والبائس، إذاً فإنّ الشخص الذي يكون غير سعيد في حياته هو شخص زرع في ذاته الأفكار السلبيّة والحزينة، وبناءً على هذه الأفكار ستكون مشاعره واستجاباته، أمّا التفكير الإيجابي فمن الممكن التدرّب عليه للوصول إلى حياة أكثر وعياً واستقراراً؛ عن طريق التركيز على النواحي والتجارب السعيدة والجيّدة، ومن المهمّ السعي الدائم لمقاومة الأفكار السلبية وعدم السماع لها بالسيطرة على أنماط تفكير الفرد، بالإضافة إلى محاولة اختيار المحيط الإيجابيّ المُحفّز، وعدم المبالغة في وصف المشاكل واستشعار خطرها الدائم، بل من الأفضل التقليل من شأنها بشكل متوازن
than that than that than that than that
3 big 3 big 3 big 3 big 3 big 3 big 3 big 3 big
cows cows cows cows cows cows cows cows
3 big cows 3 big cows 3 big cows 3 big cows 3 big cows 3 big cows 3 big cows 3 big cows
Hormat menghormati sesama manusia merujuk pada sikap saling menghargai, menghormati, dan memperlakukan orang lain dengan baik. Ini melibatkan pengakuan terhadap nilai-nilai, hak, dan martabat setiap individu tanpa memandang perbedaan seperti suku, agama, kaum, jenis kelamin, atau latar belakang lainnya. Saling menghormati mewujudkan lingkungan yang positif, memupuk hubungan yang sehat, keyakinan yang berbeza dan membangun masyarakat yang inklusif.
Hormat menghormati sesama manusia merujuk pada sikap saling menghargai, menghormati, dan memperlakukan orang lain dengan baik. Ini melibatkan pengakuan terhadap nilai-nilai, hak, dan martabat setiap individu tanpa memandang perbedaan seperti suku, agama, kaum, jenis kelamin, atau latar belakang lainnya. Saling menghormati mewujudkan lingkungan yang positif, memupuk hubungan yang sehat, keyakinan yang berbeza dan membangun masyarakat yang inklusif.
Hormat menghormati sesama manusia merujuk pada sikap saling menghargai, menghormati, dan memperlakukan orang lain dengan baik. Ini melibatkan pengakuan terhadap nilai-nilai, hak, dan martabat setiap individu tanpa memandang perbedaan seperti suku, agama, kaum, jenis kelamin, atau latar belakang lainnya. Saling menghormati mewujudkan lingkungan yang positif, memupuk hubungan yang sehat, keyakinan yang berbeza dan membangun masyarakat yang inklusif.
Once upon a time, there was a very poor girl, but nobody loved her. The girl lived alone, but she needed a friend. After some time, she met a very rich girl who was a very humble person. They began to talk and soon became very good friends. They were very close friends and had much affection for each other. The poor girl did not have parents, or a house to sleep, then the rich girl decided to invite her friend to live in her house because of friendship.
Your hands have made me and formed me. Give me understanding that I may learn your commandments. Those in awe of you see me and rejoice, because I put my hope in your word. I know, Lord, your judgments are just. In faithfulness you have afflicted me. May your lovingkindness comfort me, according to your promise to your servant. Let your tender mercies reach me, let me live, for your Torah is my delight. May the proud be put to shame for wronging me with a lie, but I will meditate on your precepts. Let those in awe of you return to me, those who know your testimonies. My heart will have integrity in following your decrees, so that I would not be ashamed.
all fag sal ass hag fad ash gag kad dad add jag lak ask glad flag shah lash lads adds alas lags dash shad half hall fall hash algal salad slash dhald dalls jakal glad shall kalsa falls glass flags
I've got a migraine, and my pain will range from up down and sideways. Thank God it's Friday, 'cause Fridays will always be better than Sundays 'cause Sundays are my suicide days. I don't know why they always seem so dismal - thunderstorms, clouds, snow, and a slight drizzle. Whether it's the weather or the letters by my bed, sometimes death seems better than the migraine in my head.
Let that be said, what the headache represents is me defending in suspense, is me suspended in a defenseless test; being tested by a ruthless examiner that's represented best by my depressing thoughts. I do not have writer's block, my writer just hates the clock. It will not let me sleep, I guess I'll sleep when I'm dead and sometimes death seems better than the migraine in my head.
The contact owns a 2017 Mazda M6 equipped with a
Yokohama 125/70R17 spare tire, DOT number unknown.
Upon inspection or his vehicle,
The contact discovered that
the original spare tire that was placed in the vehicle by
the manufacturer was 2.8 inches lower than
the original tires placed on the vehicle. The contact
stated that this failure could lead to hazardous driving conditions
when placed on the vehicle. The contact had yet to be
experience a failure. The manufacturer had yet to be
notified of the matter.
The contact owns a 2009 Ford
Escape. The contact stated that after starting the vehicle,
the power steering failed and
the steering wheel failed to turn in
either direction. The message power steering assist failure
was displayed. The cause of the failure was not yet determined.
The local dealer was not contacted. The contact was
informed by the manufacturer that the VIN was not included
in NHTSA Campaign number: 14V284000 (steering).
The contacted stated that the vehicle had experienced the
failure listed in the recall. The failure mileage was 153,000
The contact owns a 2018 Honda Civic. The contact
stated while driving approximately 20 MPH,
several unknown warning lights illuminated and
the vehicle started to idle very rough. The contact had
taken the vehicle to a local dealer however, the vehicle was not diagnosed.
The contact drove the vehicle to an independent mechanic
who diagnosed that there was an engine cylinder misfire
failure
with DTC codes: P0302 and P0303. Additionally, the
contact stated that there was a strong smell of gasoline in the cabin of the vehicle.
The vehicle was not repaired. The manufacturer had been
informed of the failure. The failure mileage was
approximately 80,000
The contact owns a 2013 GMC Yukon. The contact stated
that while driving approximately 35 MPH, the air
bags inadvertently deployed.
The contact stated that he
was not involved in any crash and did not know what caused
the failure. The contact stated that there was no
injury.
The contact stated that he then rolled the air bags up in
order to be able to see as he drove the vehicle to his residence.
The contact stated that he contacted the dealer who
informed him that the failure was not related to NHTSA
Campaign
number: 21V054100 (AirBags)
The contact stated that he
had not contacted the
manufacturer. The failure mileage was 190,000
The contact owns a 2014 Hyundai Elantra. The contact
stated that while starting the vehicle, there was an
abnormal ticking sound
Coming from the vehicle.
The vehicle was taken to the local dealer where it was
diagnosed that an engine
replacement was needed.
The vehicle was not repaired. The manufacturer was
contacted but no further assistance was provided.
The failure mileage was approximately 129,000
