At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (repre...
Being at home was like a mattress to fall back on with the smallest of peas on the bottom, just large enough to bother the princess. I was damn lucky that I had a place to call home, but I didn't like the feeling of stealing my parents food and being...
Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her...
Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neg...
What do teachers and curriculum directors mean by 'value' reading? A look at the practice of most schools suggests that when a school 'values' reading what it really means is that the school intensely focuses on raising state-mandated reading test sc...
Moral obligations verses Legal obligations. Legally, you must abide by the laws of the land or face the consequences of being fined, imprisoned or both. Moral obligations tend to lean more towards a spiritual nature of a person. Some people perform i...
Bullying is an attack upon the runts of the litter - the weak of the species, and it is predicated on a lack of bond with the parents. If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms a force-field around the child in terms of bullying. If t...
The childhood sexual abuse taught me that my value came from sex. In adulthood, I was driven to have sex since I always felt worthless. I felt important and desired until it was over and then I felt like garbage—the same way I did after the abuse. ...
Later, in my adulthood, I will read the book again, even watch the movie, and understand that I wasn’t equipped, as a child, to make room for arguments that would undermine every single choice made for me, that would shatter the foundations of my v...
We were wiser as children if not for anything else but for our ability to always reflect. Reflection is a powerful tool to move forward into an enlightened stage of wisdom. Children reflect everyday about being reprehended, what made them happy, some...
Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only p...
Ribs closing on his heart, Will battled internal sirens whose song he couldn’t yet decipher. During his childhood, ‘sin’ had been such an abstract word. It denoted getting your Sunday best dirty and torn, or lying to have your brother punished ...
Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whol...
For all their simplicity, humans could be remarkably perceptive, though they didn't know it most of the time, and their ability to thrust straight through deception and see to the heart of truth was often lost with childhood. By adulthood humans had ...
Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, ...
Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew." "He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six." "Right." "And you're the oldest." "Yes." "That's too bad. Parents always ...
...your zeal to face life's rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students...' He shook his head of disagreeable hair. 'I need not tell you,' he deplored, si...
We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes--who knows, really, but shifts in taste don't fully account for the phenomenon. At...
In the closing of this chapter, Lutzer describes the choice of forgiveness in more detail: 'Without both honesty and forgiveness, there can be no freedom from the fits of rage.' What happens through the years when such anger is left unattended or is ...
The strange thing about adulthood, when you're single, is that it's possible to go for fairly extended periods without facing blatant sin against. Sure there was plenty of sin against God but with such infrequent consequence - it was easy to self-con...
All infants and children require and deserve comfort in order to develop properly. Soft cooing voices, gentle touch, smiles, cleanliness, and wholesome food all contribute to the growing body/mind. And when these basic conditions are absent in childh...
