The major relational problem for our species is not getting together; protoplasm loves to join. The problem is preserving self in a close relationship. No human on planet Earth does that well.
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.
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,...
Maternal anxiety may be the original addiction.) To some extent, the child's reaction will depend on the extent to which mother used the child as her own addiction, fusing with the child to ward off r...
A willingness to be exposed and vulnerable. One of the major limitations of imagination’s fruits is the fear of standing out. It is more than a fear of criticism. It is anxiety at being alone, of bein...
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...
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...
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...
By the term regression I mean to convey something far more profound than a mere loss of progress. Societal regression is about the perversion of progress into a counter-evolutionary mode. In a societa...
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...
Daniel Kahneman astutely observed, No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.
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...
Leadership through self-differentiation is not easy; learning techniques and imbibing data are far easier. Nor is striving or achieving success as a leader without pain: there is the pain of isolation...
I want to stress that by well-differentiated leader I do not mean an autocrat who tells others what to do or orders them around, although any leader who defines himself or herself clearly may be perce...
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...
If lack of self-regulation is the essential characteristic of organisms that are destructive, it is the presence of self-regulatory capacity that is critical to the health, survival, and evolution of...
In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will t...
In our society today, much is made of treating children as persons, human beings who have a right to be heard. But many family leaders today bend so far in the direction of consensus, in order to avoi...
In the pages that follow I will show that America’s leadership rut has both a conceptual and an emotional dimension that reinforce one another. The conceptual dimension is the inadequacy of what I sha...
Indeed, a funeral can give a subsequent event new importance for the entire family because the newly celebrated individual becomes the replacement for the family member who has just died.
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