ALCOHOL HAS NO BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION TO ABUSE OR VIOLENCE Alcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior — anabolic steroids, for example, or crack coca...
An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up...
The central attitudes driving the Water Torturer are: You are crazy. You fly off the handle over nothing. I can easily convince other people that you’re the one who is messed up. As long as I’m calm, you can’t call anything I do abusive, no mat...
The sense of ownership is one reason why abuse tends to get worse as relationships get more serious. The more history and commitment that develop in the couple, the more the abuser comes to think of his partner as a prized object. Possessiveness is a...
The central attitudes driving the Terrorist are: You have no right to defy me or leave me. Your life is in my hands. Women are evil and have to be kept terrorized to prevent that evil from coming forth. I would rather die than accept your right to in...
Outside of my professional life, I have known many couples over the years who had passion and electricity between them and who treated each other well. But unfortunately there is wide acceptance in our society of the unhealthy notion that passion and...
I am often asked whether physical aggression by women toward men, such as a slap in the face, is abuse. The answer is: “It depends.” Men typically experience women’s shoves or slaps as annoying and infuriating rather than intimidating, so the l...
If you are aware of chronic or severe mistreatment and do not speak out against it, your silence communicates implicitly that you see nothing unacceptable taking place. Abusers interpret silence as approval, or at least as forgiveness. To abused wome...
Have you ever been writing something when you just forgot where you were, and what time it was, and you kept diving down deeper into your words? No, it's more like diving down your words--past them, and way further down into someplace out. In fact, i...
My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importan...
And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the prep...
Without inner peace, outer peace is impossible. We all wish for world peace, but world peace will never be acheived unless we first establish peace within our own minds. We can send so-called 'peacekeeping forces' into areas of conflict, but peace ca...
She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying ...
No ideology can help to create a new world or a new mind or a new human being -- because ideological orientation itself is the root cause of all the conflicts and all the miseries. Thought creates boundaries, thought creates divisions and thought cre...
Sadly, many storytellers and artists are still addicted to the old delusions (happy is boring, evil is interesting) about the risks of good mental health. Even those who don’t view peace of mind as a threat to their creative power often believe tha...
One of my friends compared me to Bruce Banner, due to my work with radiation and human health. So I looked up Bruce Banner and this is what I found: Banner, a physicist, is sarcastic and seemingly very self-assured when he first appears in Incredible...
At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thou...
Does doing something old with new technology mean that I’m teaching with technology and that I’m doing so in a way as to really improve the reading and writing skills of the students in my classroom?” (2007, 214). Her answer, as well as mine, w...
Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six months getting up an hour early to try to understand economics because I need to. I don’t ...
The Mind The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a p...
Humans are most imaginative when they need a means of self-destruction. If the world existed in an overflowing amount of happiness; a utopian state, then the suicide rate would dwarf any extinction level threat. Humans cannot be trusted with their ow...
