It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality....
In 1970, an experiment was conducted in a French laboratory in which two organisms from the same species that had not developed immune systems were moved closer and closer toward one another. At a cer...
Explaining families and institutions in terms of the nature of their parts, I began to think, was like trying to reduce chemistry to physics. Other forces come into play when one studies molecules rat...
I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, strong medicine, transfusions, and other for...
The second attribute of imaginatively gridlocked relationship systems is a continual search for new answers to old questions rather than an effort to reframe the questions themselves. In the search fo...
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. If you want your child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, stay connecte...
The extent we function and grow within the context of our own souls (a lifetime project) and abet the emergence of our own selves (by a willingness to face life's challenges and oneself), our spiritua...
Those five characteristics are: 1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another. 2. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness...
The three criteria of reptilian functioning that leaders of any family or institution can always rely on to judge madness (of others or their own) are interfering in the relationships of others; u...
I will begin by describing the nature of an emotional regression and showing how in any society, no matter how advanced its state of technology, chronic anxiety can induce an approach to life that is...
The key to survival is the ability of the host to recognize and limit the invasiveness of its viral or malignant components.
I have lived and worked in the Washington, D. C., metropolitan area for almost four decades. During this period I have watched families and institutions recycle their problems for several generations,...
It was then, after my presentations to thirty-two generals, that I first began to see how similar the approach to leadership problems was throughout our civilization. After two days of presentations,...
Daniel Kahneman astutely observed, No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.
Chronic anxiety is systemic; it is deeper and more embracing than community nervousness. Rather than something that resides within the psyche of each one, it is something that can envelope, if not act...
The degree of pain we are experiencing at any time almost always includes two variables: the stimulus causing the discomfort, and the threshold for tolerance—that is, the capacity to overcome or perha...
But no one has ever gone from slavery to freedom with the slaveholders cheering them on, nor contributed significantly to the evolution of our species by working a forty-hour week, nor achieved any si...
Although the social science construction of reality tends to emphasize how families differ from one another, I began to see that knowledge of what they have in common could be more important, as a bas...
A new world view of the brain suggests instead that communication is itself an emotional phenomenon that depends on three interrelational rather than mental variables: direction, distance, and anxiety...
While the modern, human animal is capable of deep thought and, like its mammalian forebears, can nurture and play, it also is capable of behaving in an absolutely reptilian manner.
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