When You Hurt From A Loss
"Forgetting you is not that hard to do I've done it a thousand times a day"
- lyric from "A Thousand Times A Day", by Patty Loveless
Almost everyone has gone through the pain of loss of a loved one, be it through death, divorce or the other just wanting to be out of the relationship. We all need to learn lessons from our experiences.
First of all, it’s important to realize that the hurt is our own. We impose it on ourselves. We don’t hurt for the other person, whether that person is still alive or not, we hurt for ourselves. It’s a form of self pity. The hurt is real, but no one else imposes it on us.
What if the one we love takes off and leaves us, doesn’t that mean the other person hurts us? No, it means we hurt ourselves because we regret our loss.
The love was unrequited, one-sided, at least at the point the one left the other. While we wanted the relationship to continue, the other person knew it wouldn’t work. We should ask ourselves, those of us in this situation, why we would want to continue to live with someone who knew the relationship was wrong, that it just plain wouldn’t work.
Often we feel, perhaps without admitting it to ourselves, that the loss was our own fault. We acted ourselves and it wasn’t good enough. "If only I had done things differently."
No, acting yourself is the only way you can depend on being comfortable in your own skin. The other person just didn’t want that. It’s much the same as your clearly preferring one car while disliking another. The reason doesn’t have to make sense, it just is.
How sensible is it to want someone who doesn’t want you? Isn’t that just beating yourself up?
The situation may be worse with divorce. As common as divorce is these days, it isn’t just a loss. Divorce is a signal to the world of failure. Or so many perceive it.
It may be a costly failure. That kind of mistake doesn’t come cheap in some cases. Courts and lawyers don’t help. They like records, especially when they stand to gain from record settlements.
In virtually every case of divorce, it was a bad match to start with. Something was wrong and at least one of the couple refused to admit it. "Love will conquer all" works in songs and poetry, but living it through makes for slogging that most people don’t care to endure.
Despite the fact that people living today will live almost twice as long as their recent ancestors, on average, we seem to live by the adage that "Life is short, eat the dessert first." Trouble is, many of us lose our appetite for the main course once dessert is over.
Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. (That idea was around for centuries before Einstein.) Is that not what a couple on their way to eventual divorce do?
Unfortunately, when it comes to primary relationships such as marriage or common law, do-overs seldom work. The success rate for second and third tries is perishingly low. Trying again usually just postpones the inevitable.
As with any major life loss or tragedy, the solution to a broken relationship is usually to find another one that will work better. There is no perfect mate or soul mate for most of us. We need to find someone who is prepared to tolerate us while we accept their faults, follies and failures. Love comes much easier when you can overlook those things in your significant other.
Getting past the death of a loved one, especially an unexpected death, can play hard on some people for many years. What causes the hurt? It’s our loss, not the end of life of a loved one. It’s like stabbing yourself hard.
Why does it hurt so much? Most of us are not emotionally or psychologically prepared for a sudden loss. It’s a personal loss we had no control over. Nothing we could have done might have prevented the death, in most cases. It’s life playing its worst on our heart.
Is there a way to lessen the pain? We can be better prepared. We can understand that we could get a phone call any day to say that anyone in our life has died unexpectedly. We can formulate a plan of what we would do if that happened. We can figure out exactly what procedures we would go through if something tragic happened to someone we love.
Will that lessen the loss? No. But it will make the hurt less severe, maybe having it impact our life for a shorter period of time. That’s the best we can do. Hurt is survivable for most of us. Science has proven that it is possible to die of a "broken heart" but few of us actually do.
We can also remember that our loved one might get a similar phone call to say that we have died suddenly. We can prepare plans for that too.
Death and loss of relationships are part of life. It’s worth remembering that emotions work like a pendulum: the farther they swing one way, the farther they are able to swing the other way. Those who suffer little from downswings in life lack the ability to have great joy when life is at its best for them.
The positive side of tragedy is that life always turns around. Maybe not fast enough to suit us most of the time, but that’s life.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for people who want to learn how to cope with life before they need those coping skills. It’s about learning life lessons before they are needed.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label divorce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label divorce. Show all posts
Thursday, December 08, 2011
Friday, August 06, 2010
My Man Betrayed Me
My Man Betrayed Me
Question: My partner's recent affair is causing me to lose sleep. He apologized, but is it possible to save the marriage?
Answer: If you can't live with what he did, then get out of the relationship. Remaining...will hurt you both.
- Colette Baron-Reid, Canadian intuitive, counsellor, speaker, author (b. 1958)
The questioner, no doubt fictitious, a composite of many women Baron-Reid has counselled, and her reply appeared in a column titled "Self Esteem" in the summer 2010 issue of Zoomer magazine.
The article led with a photo of a woman, alone, arms crossed, looking dejected yet angry, propped up on one side of a king size bed with a gap between the pillows so wide a Doberman could have curled up in there without troubling her. In fact, the look on the woman's face suggested a Doberman might have been welcome for protection. Or for offence.
This woman was upset, in abundance. But why? What had her man done wrong that violated something?
Had he broken his marriage vows? Not likely. Most marriage vows are not specific about fidelity. Some say "keeping only..." but those words are anything but clear. In most marriages, the husband doesn't promise to never have sexual relations with another woman. In fact, recent studies where anonymity was assured indicate that husbands have sex with at least one other woman in 85 percent of marriages.
Many will claim that fidelity is implied in the marriage vows, that a man knows he has promised to be "faithful" to his wife. As a judge would say, where is the evidence of that promise?
Should the woman feel cheated? Studies in the US show that 75 percent of wives have sex with at least one other man during the term of their marriage. I don't claim to be a math expert, but those numbers show something is very wrong.
First of all, and by no means a minor factor, is the fact that humans are mammals and like most other mammals have sexual urges that go beyond the marriage partner. Men have hormonal urges to spread their sperm (their genes) to as many available females as possible. Women have similar hormonal urges, only in their case to gather sperm from the best available males offering.
If anything, a husband who doesn't want to have sex with any woman other than his wife is unnatural. Or, in today's lingo, he would be "gay." That term doesn't necessarily mean homosexuality as it's used often as a reference to reputation.
Is every man who is faithful to his wife unnatural? Not necessarily. Some may be so sexually satisfied by their wives that they have no interest in or need to look at greater female challenges.
How many women fill that role. Many women believe, and studies can be presented to support the claim, that men never let sex get far from their minds. Their brain is locked behind a zipper. By reputation, if not by fact, that is not true of women. On the other hand, that 75 percent of unfaithful wives stands out as evidence that sex isn't buried that far down in most women.
This looks like an unworkable or unmanageable problem. It isn't necessarily.
Put four small children in a sandbox and eventually two or more of them will start scrapping. Parents interfere to show the kids social skills that apply to the situation. We don't think it unusual that kids will have differences of opinion in a confined space because they don't know the rules of social interaction that apply to that context.
What are the social rules of conduct of marriage? Where are those rules written down. Where are they taught?
Ask ten men what their specific role as husband is and most will find themselves speechless. Ask ten women who their role as wife is and several will have answers (based on what they actually do), at least answers that satisfy them. Now ask the ten husbands of those wives with answers what they understand the role of their wives to be. Again, don't expect much.
Most men expect their wives to be...Superwife. Whatever that means. Most women expect their husbands to be...something better than the man they married.
Talk about an unsolvable problem. But is it a problem when the players don't follow the rules of the game even if they don't know what the rules are and they were never asked to agree to them?
While you are speaking with those ten men and women, ask them to define "marriage," what the relationship called marriage really is supposed to be. The chances of your getting even one good answer are low. Is it, in fact, more than legalized, socially acceptable free sex? Everyone agrees it should be more, until they are asked what.
If the level and amount of legal and socially acceptable free sex works for one partner but not for the other, which feels cheated? In a relationship, does it not seem likely that the partner who feels cheated will eventually find a way to "fill the gap" with someone else, perhaps someone who serves no other meaningful purpose than satisfying the natural need for sex?
Few would disagree that sex constitutes a very important part of a marriage. Yet in how many marriages do both partners agree on the kind of sex, the amount and frequency of sex, even on the "cleaving only unto each other" part? And, in the cases of the few who agree, where would that agreement be? Is there a clause in the agreement to accommodate changes in the ability of one partner to provide for the sexual needs of the other, or the changes of interest in sex of either, or the need for variation in sexual expression of a couple over a marriage of, say, half a century?
Sex as a problem in marriage is only a problem so long as the two partners don't talk about it and reach an agreement, with both partners being honest with themselves and the other in the discussions. When one partner asks the other to defy nature, to ignore and overcome natural urges of chemicals that affect the brain as well as sex organs, it will be difficult for the agreement to stick.
Sex is only one component of marriage. If two partners don't talk about and agree about sex, they likely won't talk about other aspects of their marriage either.
Of this we may be certain: if one partner sets the rules and expects the other to follow them strictly, obediently and without failure, over time the rules will be broken and the relationship will fail.
Not that many years ago at least one partner of a marriage had died before both reached age forty. Today most people will live past 80 and many will live to see their 100th birthday. Something needs to change. If we don't talk with each other about our needs and expectations, they will not be met by our partners.
Remember the woman in the photo I mentioned at the start of this article? While her husband confessed to an affair, apologized and asked forgiveness, if nothing in the wife's behaviour changes from what caused him to look for sex with another woman in the first case, the problem with the marriage will persist. The woman in the picture thinks she did nothing wrong and has not given a thought to what she could have done differently to avoid the marriage breakdown. She believes it was all his fault.
In her mind, that's the way it plays out. Her ignorance of what constitutes marriage protects her from self recrimination. In real life, it never works that the other is always at fault. In most cases of marriage breakdown, neither partner knew what was expected of them, so they had nothing by which to assess their own performance as a partner and they believe the problem is the fault of the other. They only had their own feelings to evaluate their partner with.
If marriage today is a contract, then both parties need to know the details, the clauses, the expectations of the other, the needs of the other and what they should do if they find their needs are not being met.
Imagine the implications of a marriage contract being renewable every five years.
Bill Allin in the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to have their children develop in all the ways they need, not just physical and intellectual. The book has hands-on materials for parents and teachers.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Question: My partner's recent affair is causing me to lose sleep. He apologized, but is it possible to save the marriage?
Answer: If you can't live with what he did, then get out of the relationship. Remaining...will hurt you both.
- Colette Baron-Reid, Canadian intuitive, counsellor, speaker, author (b. 1958)
The questioner, no doubt fictitious, a composite of many women Baron-Reid has counselled, and her reply appeared in a column titled "Self Esteem" in the summer 2010 issue of Zoomer magazine.
The article led with a photo of a woman, alone, arms crossed, looking dejected yet angry, propped up on one side of a king size bed with a gap between the pillows so wide a Doberman could have curled up in there without troubling her. In fact, the look on the woman's face suggested a Doberman might have been welcome for protection. Or for offence.
This woman was upset, in abundance. But why? What had her man done wrong that violated something?
Had he broken his marriage vows? Not likely. Most marriage vows are not specific about fidelity. Some say "keeping only..." but those words are anything but clear. In most marriages, the husband doesn't promise to never have sexual relations with another woman. In fact, recent studies where anonymity was assured indicate that husbands have sex with at least one other woman in 85 percent of marriages.
Many will claim that fidelity is implied in the marriage vows, that a man knows he has promised to be "faithful" to his wife. As a judge would say, where is the evidence of that promise?
Should the woman feel cheated? Studies in the US show that 75 percent of wives have sex with at least one other man during the term of their marriage. I don't claim to be a math expert, but those numbers show something is very wrong.
First of all, and by no means a minor factor, is the fact that humans are mammals and like most other mammals have sexual urges that go beyond the marriage partner. Men have hormonal urges to spread their sperm (their genes) to as many available females as possible. Women have similar hormonal urges, only in their case to gather sperm from the best available males offering.
If anything, a husband who doesn't want to have sex with any woman other than his wife is unnatural. Or, in today's lingo, he would be "gay." That term doesn't necessarily mean homosexuality as it's used often as a reference to reputation.
Is every man who is faithful to his wife unnatural? Not necessarily. Some may be so sexually satisfied by their wives that they have no interest in or need to look at greater female challenges.
How many women fill that role. Many women believe, and studies can be presented to support the claim, that men never let sex get far from their minds. Their brain is locked behind a zipper. By reputation, if not by fact, that is not true of women. On the other hand, that 75 percent of unfaithful wives stands out as evidence that sex isn't buried that far down in most women.
This looks like an unworkable or unmanageable problem. It isn't necessarily.
Put four small children in a sandbox and eventually two or more of them will start scrapping. Parents interfere to show the kids social skills that apply to the situation. We don't think it unusual that kids will have differences of opinion in a confined space because they don't know the rules of social interaction that apply to that context.
What are the social rules of conduct of marriage? Where are those rules written down. Where are they taught?
Ask ten men what their specific role as husband is and most will find themselves speechless. Ask ten women who their role as wife is and several will have answers (based on what they actually do), at least answers that satisfy them. Now ask the ten husbands of those wives with answers what they understand the role of their wives to be. Again, don't expect much.
Most men expect their wives to be...Superwife. Whatever that means. Most women expect their husbands to be...something better than the man they married.
Talk about an unsolvable problem. But is it a problem when the players don't follow the rules of the game even if they don't know what the rules are and they were never asked to agree to them?
While you are speaking with those ten men and women, ask them to define "marriage," what the relationship called marriage really is supposed to be. The chances of your getting even one good answer are low. Is it, in fact, more than legalized, socially acceptable free sex? Everyone agrees it should be more, until they are asked what.
If the level and amount of legal and socially acceptable free sex works for one partner but not for the other, which feels cheated? In a relationship, does it not seem likely that the partner who feels cheated will eventually find a way to "fill the gap" with someone else, perhaps someone who serves no other meaningful purpose than satisfying the natural need for sex?
Few would disagree that sex constitutes a very important part of a marriage. Yet in how many marriages do both partners agree on the kind of sex, the amount and frequency of sex, even on the "cleaving only unto each other" part? And, in the cases of the few who agree, where would that agreement be? Is there a clause in the agreement to accommodate changes in the ability of one partner to provide for the sexual needs of the other, or the changes of interest in sex of either, or the need for variation in sexual expression of a couple over a marriage of, say, half a century?
Sex as a problem in marriage is only a problem so long as the two partners don't talk about it and reach an agreement, with both partners being honest with themselves and the other in the discussions. When one partner asks the other to defy nature, to ignore and overcome natural urges of chemicals that affect the brain as well as sex organs, it will be difficult for the agreement to stick.
Sex is only one component of marriage. If two partners don't talk about and agree about sex, they likely won't talk about other aspects of their marriage either.
Of this we may be certain: if one partner sets the rules and expects the other to follow them strictly, obediently and without failure, over time the rules will be broken and the relationship will fail.
Not that many years ago at least one partner of a marriage had died before both reached age forty. Today most people will live past 80 and many will live to see their 100th birthday. Something needs to change. If we don't talk with each other about our needs and expectations, they will not be met by our partners.
Remember the woman in the photo I mentioned at the start of this article? While her husband confessed to an affair, apologized and asked forgiveness, if nothing in the wife's behaviour changes from what caused him to look for sex with another woman in the first case, the problem with the marriage will persist. The woman in the picture thinks she did nothing wrong and has not given a thought to what she could have done differently to avoid the marriage breakdown. She believes it was all his fault.
In her mind, that's the way it plays out. Her ignorance of what constitutes marriage protects her from self recrimination. In real life, it never works that the other is always at fault. In most cases of marriage breakdown, neither partner knew what was expected of them, so they had nothing by which to assess their own performance as a partner and they believe the problem is the fault of the other. They only had their own feelings to evaluate their partner with.
If marriage today is a contract, then both parties need to know the details, the clauses, the expectations of the other, the needs of the other and what they should do if they find their needs are not being met.
Imagine the implications of a marriage contract being renewable every five years.
Bill Allin in the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to have their children develop in all the ways they need, not just physical and intellectual. The book has hands-on materials for parents and teachers.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Have We Created Societies of Social Welfare Bums?
Have We Created Societies of Social Welfare Bums?
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
What do love and jealousy have to do with welfare? A great deal, as you will learn. First let me note that the two paragraphs that comprise the quote come from different sources by Heinlein.
Let's lead off with a big idea, though one you should find comfort with. We have people for whom someone or some people other than themselves takes priority over their own best interests. And we have people who, when all distractions are stripped away, have their own best interests of primary importance.
Doesn't everyone give importance to their own best interests? Of course, it's how we survive. Doesn't everyone have to put the interests of others ahead of their own sometimes? Yes, but in the case of our self-first group, putting the interests of others ahead of their own may indeed be in their own bests interests. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take the example of a highly paid executive who makes a sizable donation to charity right before the end of income tax season. By no small coincidence the amount of the donation happens to lower his income below a threshold, putting him into a lower tax bracket. In the end he is money in pocket and he receives acclaim for his donations. Is that bad? No, most of us would do it if we could. But that person can't claim to have the best interests of others ahead of his own if he will benefit financially from the donation. His own wallet counts first.
Now let's take the example of a parent who loads his adolescent son with electronic toys and gadgetry, so much so that the boy spends much of his time at home alone playing with the games. Admirable, huh? Except when you realize that the parent has thereby relieved himself of the parental obligation of interacting with the child, of teaching life lessons to the child while conveying the benefits of a close relationship between parent and child. That's what parents are supposed to do, what they have done throughout human history. The parent avoids that. That puts his own interests ahead of those of his son, no matter how he appeases his conscience by telling himself how good a father he was to give his son so much, more than he had as a child.
Another example, this time from the other group, might be the businessman who takes time out of his work week to mentor school kids--or even one child--so that the children have examples of good role models other than their own parent(s). Many other adults belong to service organizations in their communities where they volunteer many hours each year to benefit certain groups or individuals with needs they can't otherwise meet. They help, others benefit.
We have one group who loves themselves first, another who loves others more. You likely know many of each type. You may even have friends of both types. "Love" may be a strong word for people for whom love is, essentially, a business arrangement.
To put this into clearer perspective, let's take an extreme example of a life crisis. Let's say a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or tornado destroys one or more distribution centres for electricity in your area. It will take weeks, maybe months, before power is restored to your home and every other home, business, factory, recreation hall and other gathering place within 500 kilometres of where you live.
At crisis times, we all need allies. It's the time when everyone should pull together. In this scenario, which group of people would you rather have as your allies, the self-interested ones or the ones who willingly share and think of others before themselves?
That's easy to answer, you may say. Choose the group who will help you most. That extreme example was only to give perspective. Life is filled with all kinds of situations of a less critical nature in which we could use help from others. You might have a flat tire on the freeway and your cell phone battery is dead. If someone were to stop to help you, which group would you expect the helper to come from?
Some people can't make it in life. For many reasons, they have fallen into a pit of problems from which they can't extract themselves. They lose their job, can't pay their mortgage, get hassled by credit card companies, and so on. No matter what they do, they can't manage to put their ducks in line.
We have welfare (also known as social assistance) to help them. But for how long? If they do not have the necessary work skills, attitude and work ethic to get and hold a job, it could be years before they can pay their way in life again, if ever. Somehow they didn't get what they needed while they were in school, including life skills that could help them to survive in times of crisis.
They often live in the poorest quality of housing, maybe it reeks of the urine of past occupants or harbours cockroaches or has plumbing that works only sporadically. Or all of the aforementioned. It's not pleasant to be inside, especially in summer, so they sit outside with their beverage of choice, often beer.
That's where they are when some people see them and complain that "we pay our taxes so these people can sit around home all day and drink beer." Have you ever heard one of those complainers express a desire to change places with those welfare "whores" they despise? If life is so easy for welfare recipients, why would more people not want to change places with them?
We have many people in our society who, for a variety of reasons (none of them pleasant), must spend many years in prison. The prisons allow the inmates to work, for which they receive a little money (a dollar a day, for example) they can use to buy small treats for themselves. They often have access to libraries and classes to upgrade their education. And they can watch television.
Setting aside the discussion of the mood we might expect prisoners to be in (remember, they must associate with staff members who are outsiders to them) if we kept them confined full time in mind-numbing violence-inducing cells, we have people who condemn prisons for being places of luxury. "It's a great life and we pay for it!" Have you ever heard one person who seriously would trade places with a prisoner for any given period of time? Of course not. They know life is not luxurious or comfy in prison, no matter what they say.
Some people want to help those confined to prisons. Some want to help those who are stuck on welfare because they can't figure out how to dig themselves out of it. Some want to throw a lifeline to people who have lost their jobs or whose homes have been lost to fire. Or people whose life mates have walked out, leaving them alone enough to want to end their lives. Or people of an age they should retire because their health is not so good, but they can't because they have lost their life savings to some scam or stock market downturn.
They are the helpers. They are the "liberals" who want to "help out every freeloader who can't be bothered to work enough to earn a proper living." Even though not one of the self-first complainers would ever offer to change places with a person with a problem, they condemn those who would help. Because helping others does not help themselves and they are always more important than any others.
Those helpers are the ones you want as allies in a crisis. Ironically, the helpers will, in a crisis, help even the most self-interested lamers.
Returning now to our opening quote from Heinlein about love and jealousy, does it become obvious to you which group of people are likely to become jealous and which more apt to love others?
If you have a mate who is jealous, now you know why. That mate is not someone who would lay down their life for you in an emergency, no matter if you would for them or not.
Study your friends, workmates and neighbours and you will see which are the selfish ones and which the generous helpers. Some love themselves first and foremost, some love others more.
Remember, you will eventually have a crisis in your own life. Cultivate the helpers now so that they will support you when you need them. That's what friends do, though they serve much different functions most of the time.
The old saying goes: to make a friend you need first to be a friend. If you want to have a helping kind of person as a friend, you will need to make friendly gestures to that person first if they are not already your friend.
In other words, help someone else now who needs your help. That person needs a friend now and will be your friend later when you need him or her. Maybe. The ones who become friends will far outweigh in benefits to you those who take what you give and forget about you.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to raise their children to be helpers, to be able to make friends, to be self sufficient yet comfortable with interdependence.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
What do love and jealousy have to do with welfare? A great deal, as you will learn. First let me note that the two paragraphs that comprise the quote come from different sources by Heinlein.
Let's lead off with a big idea, though one you should find comfort with. We have people for whom someone or some people other than themselves takes priority over their own best interests. And we have people who, when all distractions are stripped away, have their own best interests of primary importance.
Doesn't everyone give importance to their own best interests? Of course, it's how we survive. Doesn't everyone have to put the interests of others ahead of their own sometimes? Yes, but in the case of our self-first group, putting the interests of others ahead of their own may indeed be in their own bests interests. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take the example of a highly paid executive who makes a sizable donation to charity right before the end of income tax season. By no small coincidence the amount of the donation happens to lower his income below a threshold, putting him into a lower tax bracket. In the end he is money in pocket and he receives acclaim for his donations. Is that bad? No, most of us would do it if we could. But that person can't claim to have the best interests of others ahead of his own if he will benefit financially from the donation. His own wallet counts first.
Now let's take the example of a parent who loads his adolescent son with electronic toys and gadgetry, so much so that the boy spends much of his time at home alone playing with the games. Admirable, huh? Except when you realize that the parent has thereby relieved himself of the parental obligation of interacting with the child, of teaching life lessons to the child while conveying the benefits of a close relationship between parent and child. That's what parents are supposed to do, what they have done throughout human history. The parent avoids that. That puts his own interests ahead of those of his son, no matter how he appeases his conscience by telling himself how good a father he was to give his son so much, more than he had as a child.
Another example, this time from the other group, might be the businessman who takes time out of his work week to mentor school kids--or even one child--so that the children have examples of good role models other than their own parent(s). Many other adults belong to service organizations in their communities where they volunteer many hours each year to benefit certain groups or individuals with needs they can't otherwise meet. They help, others benefit.
We have one group who loves themselves first, another who loves others more. You likely know many of each type. You may even have friends of both types. "Love" may be a strong word for people for whom love is, essentially, a business arrangement.
To put this into clearer perspective, let's take an extreme example of a life crisis. Let's say a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or tornado destroys one or more distribution centres for electricity in your area. It will take weeks, maybe months, before power is restored to your home and every other home, business, factory, recreation hall and other gathering place within 500 kilometres of where you live.
At crisis times, we all need allies. It's the time when everyone should pull together. In this scenario, which group of people would you rather have as your allies, the self-interested ones or the ones who willingly share and think of others before themselves?
That's easy to answer, you may say. Choose the group who will help you most. That extreme example was only to give perspective. Life is filled with all kinds of situations of a less critical nature in which we could use help from others. You might have a flat tire on the freeway and your cell phone battery is dead. If someone were to stop to help you, which group would you expect the helper to come from?
Some people can't make it in life. For many reasons, they have fallen into a pit of problems from which they can't extract themselves. They lose their job, can't pay their mortgage, get hassled by credit card companies, and so on. No matter what they do, they can't manage to put their ducks in line.
We have welfare (also known as social assistance) to help them. But for how long? If they do not have the necessary work skills, attitude and work ethic to get and hold a job, it could be years before they can pay their way in life again, if ever. Somehow they didn't get what they needed while they were in school, including life skills that could help them to survive in times of crisis.
They often live in the poorest quality of housing, maybe it reeks of the urine of past occupants or harbours cockroaches or has plumbing that works only sporadically. Or all of the aforementioned. It's not pleasant to be inside, especially in summer, so they sit outside with their beverage of choice, often beer.
That's where they are when some people see them and complain that "we pay our taxes so these people can sit around home all day and drink beer." Have you ever heard one of those complainers express a desire to change places with those welfare "whores" they despise? If life is so easy for welfare recipients, why would more people not want to change places with them?
We have many people in our society who, for a variety of reasons (none of them pleasant), must spend many years in prison. The prisons allow the inmates to work, for which they receive a little money (a dollar a day, for example) they can use to buy small treats for themselves. They often have access to libraries and classes to upgrade their education. And they can watch television.
Setting aside the discussion of the mood we might expect prisoners to be in (remember, they must associate with staff members who are outsiders to them) if we kept them confined full time in mind-numbing violence-inducing cells, we have people who condemn prisons for being places of luxury. "It's a great life and we pay for it!" Have you ever heard one person who seriously would trade places with a prisoner for any given period of time? Of course not. They know life is not luxurious or comfy in prison, no matter what they say.
Some people want to help those confined to prisons. Some want to help those who are stuck on welfare because they can't figure out how to dig themselves out of it. Some want to throw a lifeline to people who have lost their jobs or whose homes have been lost to fire. Or people whose life mates have walked out, leaving them alone enough to want to end their lives. Or people of an age they should retire because their health is not so good, but they can't because they have lost their life savings to some scam or stock market downturn.
They are the helpers. They are the "liberals" who want to "help out every freeloader who can't be bothered to work enough to earn a proper living." Even though not one of the self-first complainers would ever offer to change places with a person with a problem, they condemn those who would help. Because helping others does not help themselves and they are always more important than any others.
Those helpers are the ones you want as allies in a crisis. Ironically, the helpers will, in a crisis, help even the most self-interested lamers.
Returning now to our opening quote from Heinlein about love and jealousy, does it become obvious to you which group of people are likely to become jealous and which more apt to love others?
If you have a mate who is jealous, now you know why. That mate is not someone who would lay down their life for you in an emergency, no matter if you would for them or not.
Study your friends, workmates and neighbours and you will see which are the selfish ones and which the generous helpers. Some love themselves first and foremost, some love others more.
Remember, you will eventually have a crisis in your own life. Cultivate the helpers now so that they will support you when you need them. That's what friends do, though they serve much different functions most of the time.
The old saying goes: to make a friend you need first to be a friend. If you want to have a helping kind of person as a friend, you will need to make friendly gestures to that person first if they are not already your friend.
In other words, help someone else now who needs your help. That person needs a friend now and will be your friend later when you need him or her. Maybe. The ones who become friends will far outweigh in benefits to you those who take what you give and forget about you.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to raise their children to be helpers, to be able to make friends, to be self sufficient yet comfortable with interdependence.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Sunday, July 26, 2009
What Can We Do With Sinners And Losers?
Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
- Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic, activist (1909-1943)
I have never met a person who, as a child, wanted to grow up to be a criminal, a drug addict, a gulper of prescribed drugs, a divorcee, a workaholic, a gambling addict, an alcoholic or a wife beater. Nor have I ever heard or read of one.
Yet somehow so many of us grow into these roles in life.
Are we a society of losers?
A recovered alcoholic, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, considers himself a lifelong addict. Does that mean we should consider him a lifelong loser and treat him as a social pariah, as human detritus?
If not, then how should we think of and treat such people? How, indeed, should we think of and treat those who still "suffer" daily with their affliction? Is it even possible to have our governments provide sufficient assistance to help a significant number of them recover? Many people believe it's not possible.
The subject of helping people to recover from their life problems is so enormous that most of us prefer to not think about it. "It would just cost us more taxes." Of course those people don't realize how much of their taxes already go into dealing with the social problems these people create, including the cost of health insurance and maintaining prisons and rehab facilities for them. Some estimate that figure as high as half our taxes today.
We don't want to face up to the fact that society has failed them. Especially because we have no clue about how we could have failed them. Fair enough. Let's worry about what we can fix.
Now return to my first sentence. We, as parents, as teachers, as relatives and neighbours, grow our own children from scratch. They learn what we teach them.
They learn what we teach them. They learn what we teach them. So let's teach them what they need before they need it. Before they break.
Too many of us believe that children should be kept in innocence for as long as possible. Such people are wrong and dangerous to society. The whole purpose of childhood is to learn how to cope with the rigors of adulthood. Not to turn childhood innocence into adult ignorance. A child that doesn't learn as early as possible about the pitfalls as problems of adults is doomed to fall victim to them and not have any defences at the ready.
We have long established traditions for teaching children what they need to know. One is called schools. The other is called parents. If that sounds patronizing, remember that these are the primary sources of education for children, all children. In a Canadian study of teens a few years ago, 89 percent of them claimed that most of what they learned about life came directly from their parents.
In general, schools are not allowed to teach what kids need so that they can cope with the rigors of the adult world they are growing into. Schools are directed, by curriculum and policy, to teach what kids will need to be employable, to be good employees. However, schools suffer from the lack of need satisfaction in the teens they teach through discipline problems. Students who can cope with their problems suffer from loss of classroom time when the troubled kids act out.
Most young parents know little or nothing more than what they learned about parenting from their own parents. Which is grossly insufficient. Which dooms their children to develop the kinds of problems mentioned at the start of this article.
New parents whose goal is to be better parents than their own parents were to them are lucky. They know they need to do something different. Unfortunately, they don't know what to do. They know what they want to be different for their kids, but not necessarily how to achieve it. They have no easily accessible source for that information.
Western societies are extremely lucky that they don't have more social problems than they do. They must be doing something right. After all, western societies have few problems with terrorism, war and other forms of rampant violence found in other parts of the world, parts that claim that parents do know what they should be teaching their children. Maybe not.
No matter where in the world you look, social problems abound.
Does that mean that social problems are unavoidable? No. It means that, in general, people in all parts of the world have no clear idea what to teach their children to help them cope with life in the 21st century.
Sadly, the last time our ancestors did have a good idea about what to teach their children to help them to cope with life, they all lived in tribes. In tribes, the social norm is that every adult bears some responsibility for teaching every child. As little changed from one year to the next, from one decade to the next, knowing what to teach children was adopted as social policy for the tribe. Everyone taught children the same things. Every child got the same message.
We don't do that today. If anything, parents go out of their way to make sure their kids don't grow up like other kids. That's a social norm. Everyone should be different, we believe.
Yet everyone is the same in many ways. We all have the same needs, for example, with few exceptions.
Schools address the needs of employers. Parents address the needs of their children so long as they know what those needs are. However, so many of the needs of children are unknown mysteries to many parents. Most parents learn parenting "on the job."
Many parents don't teach their children about drugs for fear that the kids will "experiment" with drugs. By the time the parents decide to teach the kids about drugs, the kids have already learned about drugs on the street, in the schoolyard, in the parks, virtually everywhere they go. Some kids already take drugs by the time their parents decide it's time to teach them about drugs.
How's that for timing, for knowing what kids need and when?
Why would a child, an adolescent, an adult need to turn to drugs? Simone Weil said it's an attempt to fly from emptiness. What's empty?
Better to say that human needs have gone unfulfilled. The need for fulfillment of needs is what is empty.
Does that sound like psychobabble? That's what many people would say, people who don't know what children need at all, let alone when they should learn stuff that will fulfill their needs. Ignorant people often have strong opinions against evidence that they are ignorant.
It's true that children are not small adults and should not be treated that way. If they were, we would have to punish them for offences they didn't know were offences. For misdeeds they did because they didn't have the words to explain to their parents and teachers what they needed. For bad stuff they did out of frustration because they needed something they couldn't talk about, but adults didn't know either so they ignored the needs of the children, thinking they were just misbehaving. Yet that is what most punishment of children is about.
A child needs to know how to deal with every social situation he experiences. We know that for adults, so we provide ways to teach them social skills, sort of. Few children receive any significant amount of instruction about social skills. They learn the hard way, by making mistakes. Or by watching what happens when other kids make mistakes.
But that is teaching what not to do in social situations, not what to do proactively, before the information is needed. We need to teach social skills to children, to address their social development when they need it most. They need the skills before they need to put the skills into practice. In teaching skills to children, especially social and emotional skills, timing is critical.
We also need to address their emotional development. Huh? Why do so many adults experience heartbreak when a relationship with a mate who is incompatible with them breaks up? Why do more than half the couples who marry get divorced later? That number should be even greater except that many couples today skip the wedding part and simply live together until they separate later because one of them "failed" the other or they "grew apart."
Understanding emotional skills and knowledge is part of what we need to get along well with others. As a social species, we need to have social interactions with others. In most activities people do--either personal or work related--they need to interact with others.
Socially and emotionally well adapted and developed children and adolescents become socially and emotionally well adapted and developed adults. Moreover, socially and emotionally successful adults are not only well liked and appreciated, they do a great deal to help others in their families, their communities and their countries. They gain great public respect because they do things they seem to understand--almost intuitively--are right. Nobel Peace Prize winners, for an example.
Teaching to the social and emotional needs of children and adolescents is not hard. We simply have not put into place the mechanisms for doing it. The needs themselves are not secrets, they're public information. Unfortunately, most of that information is contained in psychologists who specialize in fixing broken people rather than in teaching everyone before they break. And in sociologists who manipulate us by advertising, religion and politics because we don't want to listen to what they know otherwise.
While we long for innocence, what we get is ignorance. There is nothing pretty or beneficial about ignorance.
We have schools, but we use them almost exclusively to train children to be successful employees, not successful adults. The change would be easy and cheap, but someone has to make the first move in every community.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow socially and emotionally well developed and balanced children, not just intellectually well developed employees.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic, activist (1909-1943)
I have never met a person who, as a child, wanted to grow up to be a criminal, a drug addict, a gulper of prescribed drugs, a divorcee, a workaholic, a gambling addict, an alcoholic or a wife beater. Nor have I ever heard or read of one.
Yet somehow so many of us grow into these roles in life.
Are we a society of losers?
A recovered alcoholic, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, considers himself a lifelong addict. Does that mean we should consider him a lifelong loser and treat him as a social pariah, as human detritus?
If not, then how should we think of and treat such people? How, indeed, should we think of and treat those who still "suffer" daily with their affliction? Is it even possible to have our governments provide sufficient assistance to help a significant number of them recover? Many people believe it's not possible.
The subject of helping people to recover from their life problems is so enormous that most of us prefer to not think about it. "It would just cost us more taxes." Of course those people don't realize how much of their taxes already go into dealing with the social problems these people create, including the cost of health insurance and maintaining prisons and rehab facilities for them. Some estimate that figure as high as half our taxes today.
We don't want to face up to the fact that society has failed them. Especially because we have no clue about how we could have failed them. Fair enough. Let's worry about what we can fix.
Now return to my first sentence. We, as parents, as teachers, as relatives and neighbours, grow our own children from scratch. They learn what we teach them.
They learn what we teach them. They learn what we teach them. So let's teach them what they need before they need it. Before they break.
Too many of us believe that children should be kept in innocence for as long as possible. Such people are wrong and dangerous to society. The whole purpose of childhood is to learn how to cope with the rigors of adulthood. Not to turn childhood innocence into adult ignorance. A child that doesn't learn as early as possible about the pitfalls as problems of adults is doomed to fall victim to them and not have any defences at the ready.
We have long established traditions for teaching children what they need to know. One is called schools. The other is called parents. If that sounds patronizing, remember that these are the primary sources of education for children, all children. In a Canadian study of teens a few years ago, 89 percent of them claimed that most of what they learned about life came directly from their parents.
In general, schools are not allowed to teach what kids need so that they can cope with the rigors of the adult world they are growing into. Schools are directed, by curriculum and policy, to teach what kids will need to be employable, to be good employees. However, schools suffer from the lack of need satisfaction in the teens they teach through discipline problems. Students who can cope with their problems suffer from loss of classroom time when the troubled kids act out.
Most young parents know little or nothing more than what they learned about parenting from their own parents. Which is grossly insufficient. Which dooms their children to develop the kinds of problems mentioned at the start of this article.
New parents whose goal is to be better parents than their own parents were to them are lucky. They know they need to do something different. Unfortunately, they don't know what to do. They know what they want to be different for their kids, but not necessarily how to achieve it. They have no easily accessible source for that information.
Western societies are extremely lucky that they don't have more social problems than they do. They must be doing something right. After all, western societies have few problems with terrorism, war and other forms of rampant violence found in other parts of the world, parts that claim that parents do know what they should be teaching their children. Maybe not.
No matter where in the world you look, social problems abound.
Does that mean that social problems are unavoidable? No. It means that, in general, people in all parts of the world have no clear idea what to teach their children to help them cope with life in the 21st century.
Sadly, the last time our ancestors did have a good idea about what to teach their children to help them to cope with life, they all lived in tribes. In tribes, the social norm is that every adult bears some responsibility for teaching every child. As little changed from one year to the next, from one decade to the next, knowing what to teach children was adopted as social policy for the tribe. Everyone taught children the same things. Every child got the same message.
We don't do that today. If anything, parents go out of their way to make sure their kids don't grow up like other kids. That's a social norm. Everyone should be different, we believe.
Yet everyone is the same in many ways. We all have the same needs, for example, with few exceptions.
Schools address the needs of employers. Parents address the needs of their children so long as they know what those needs are. However, so many of the needs of children are unknown mysteries to many parents. Most parents learn parenting "on the job."
Many parents don't teach their children about drugs for fear that the kids will "experiment" with drugs. By the time the parents decide to teach the kids about drugs, the kids have already learned about drugs on the street, in the schoolyard, in the parks, virtually everywhere they go. Some kids already take drugs by the time their parents decide it's time to teach them about drugs.
How's that for timing, for knowing what kids need and when?
Why would a child, an adolescent, an adult need to turn to drugs? Simone Weil said it's an attempt to fly from emptiness. What's empty?
Better to say that human needs have gone unfulfilled. The need for fulfillment of needs is what is empty.
Does that sound like psychobabble? That's what many people would say, people who don't know what children need at all, let alone when they should learn stuff that will fulfill their needs. Ignorant people often have strong opinions against evidence that they are ignorant.
It's true that children are not small adults and should not be treated that way. If they were, we would have to punish them for offences they didn't know were offences. For misdeeds they did because they didn't have the words to explain to their parents and teachers what they needed. For bad stuff they did out of frustration because they needed something they couldn't talk about, but adults didn't know either so they ignored the needs of the children, thinking they were just misbehaving. Yet that is what most punishment of children is about.
A child needs to know how to deal with every social situation he experiences. We know that for adults, so we provide ways to teach them social skills, sort of. Few children receive any significant amount of instruction about social skills. They learn the hard way, by making mistakes. Or by watching what happens when other kids make mistakes.
But that is teaching what not to do in social situations, not what to do proactively, before the information is needed. We need to teach social skills to children, to address their social development when they need it most. They need the skills before they need to put the skills into practice. In teaching skills to children, especially social and emotional skills, timing is critical.
We also need to address their emotional development. Huh? Why do so many adults experience heartbreak when a relationship with a mate who is incompatible with them breaks up? Why do more than half the couples who marry get divorced later? That number should be even greater except that many couples today skip the wedding part and simply live together until they separate later because one of them "failed" the other or they "grew apart."
Understanding emotional skills and knowledge is part of what we need to get along well with others. As a social species, we need to have social interactions with others. In most activities people do--either personal or work related--they need to interact with others.
Socially and emotionally well adapted and developed children and adolescents become socially and emotionally well adapted and developed adults. Moreover, socially and emotionally successful adults are not only well liked and appreciated, they do a great deal to help others in their families, their communities and their countries. They gain great public respect because they do things they seem to understand--almost intuitively--are right. Nobel Peace Prize winners, for an example.
Teaching to the social and emotional needs of children and adolescents is not hard. We simply have not put into place the mechanisms for doing it. The needs themselves are not secrets, they're public information. Unfortunately, most of that information is contained in psychologists who specialize in fixing broken people rather than in teaching everyone before they break. And in sociologists who manipulate us by advertising, religion and politics because we don't want to listen to what they know otherwise.
While we long for innocence, what we get is ignorance. There is nothing pretty or beneficial about ignorance.
We have schools, but we use them almost exclusively to train children to be successful employees, not successful adults. The change would be easy and cheap, but someone has to make the first move in every community.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow socially and emotionally well developed and balanced children, not just intellectually well developed employees.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, August 29, 2008
Why So Many Women Get It So Wrong
For a woman, finding the right man to love her the way she wants to be loved, to be a good father to the children they create together and to provide a healthy, vibrant, creative and enjoyable family environment that will last a lifetime is almost impossible.
Why? While there are many reasons, a few stand out.
Most commonly, a woman goes looking for the wrong guy. Back in prehistoric days, a woman wanted a strong man, the best warrior in the tribe, someone who could provide for and defend her family. If he was good looking, even better. If he fertilized other women, so be it, so long as he looked after the best interests of her family.
That attitude persists today, even though almost everything else in life has changed. Women still want the handsomest, strongest, sexiest guy with demonstrated ability at leadership as he gathers other guys to follow his lead. Anyone who doubts this should check out how girls in the latter years of grade school and in high school tart themselves up for the guys. They may want to be treated as sweet and innocent, but they look and act like hookers because they know what guys like to look at.
No question, guys like to look at attractive women. If they could, they would take every one of them to bed. But they wouldn't necessarily want to spend their lives with them.
If I guy can score with a girl who looks and acts like a hooker, but not have to pay fees, he considers himself a winner. And so would his buddies. But guys don't want to marry hookers, because...they have proven that they have too many other sexual interests. Girls who look like hookers and put out sexual vibes like hookers may get the attention of guys, but those guys don't want to marry them.
The same applies to the captain of the football or basketball team, or any other jock who looks good stripped to...well, stripped. While most girls are attracted to these guys, many have none of the other qualities a woman should be looking for. That "get the best possible male to mate with" attitude persists even though we no longer live in tribes.
The best warrior in the tribe in prehistoric days seldom lived past age 24, almost never past age 30. Since the tribe did much of the teaching of children anyway, getting the best set of genes seemed wise. The warrior would always be busy with matters other than those relating to the family, and women knew that. Today, the same guy would be a terrible person to depend on for personal and family values.
Today, most men live past 30. It's the next 50 or 60 years after that the women who marry them can't stand.
Very few of the skills a young man learns in high school apply to the fulfillment of responsibilities of a family man. We don't teach the skills that families need, that women should be looking for. So young women continue to want the best looking guy they can get. And when they marry and he fails to satisfy the needs of her or their children, they can't figure out why.
The most popular girls and guys in high school get so used to constant attention from members of the opposite sex that they continue to want that attention into college, into their work lives later and into their time as parents. They don't need commitment, they need attention. Girls should want a life partner who gives attention, not one who seeks it from them.
Girls naturally favour men with confidence. Whether in men or women, confidence is the most important characteristic of beautiful people. An average looking person with lots of confidence and a big smile can be a sex symbol. Just look at the stars of movies, only they have the addition of makeup to make them look even more perfect. Brad Pitt may be great for the imagination, but few women could tolerate spending a life with that kind of man.
As great as confidence is--I firmly believe it is critically important to a person's well-being--it does absolutely nothing to make a man a better husband, lover, father, provider or planner. Confidence is but one characteristic of a person. That characteristic can be taught and learned. Most people who have confidence learned it by themselves, though it can be learned by taking classes of various kinds.
Those who don't have confidence in themselves and their abilities and strengths should take a class to learn how to show confidence, to feel confident.
Men need more skills than confidence, good looks and rippling muscles to be good husbands, fathers and long term friends. For a woman to depend on the looks of a man as the main feature she loves and wants would be the same as a man loving a woman because she has breast implants, a tummy tuck, butt rounding, a nose job, reconfigured ears and a hair transplant. Every study ever done shows that most men don't want those features in a wife and mother. A majority of men want "natural" women, no matter if they have body features that are not perfect.
Women shouldn't depend on good looks and popularity as characteristics that will make a man a good husband and father. In fact, nothing about the appearance of a man, good or not so good, can be held as predictors of what he will be like as a husband, lover, father, provider, friend or sleepmate.
Advice to women: When looking for a mate, search for one who has the characteristics you want in a man for what you want to do with him in the years to come. If one you like doesn't have those characteristics, make sure he is the kind of man who will gladly learn what he needs to know. If he won't, look elsewhere, quickly.
Advice to men who have read this far: The same applies to you when looking for a lifemate. Paris Hilton or Salma Hayak or someone with the name of Diaz or Cruz may be great to ogle, but they won't necessarily have the characteristics you want at home. And they will always want the attention they get now from other men.
It's not just a matter of caveat emptor. It's a matter of looking for what you really want rather than wanting someone who looks good but has nothing else to offer that you will find valuable in the years to come.
Think ahead. Unfortunately, most people don't get better with age. If you want a partner that will, look for that characteristic before you settle.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to cope with the needs of their lives instead of depending on television and movies to tell them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Why? While there are many reasons, a few stand out.
Most commonly, a woman goes looking for the wrong guy. Back in prehistoric days, a woman wanted a strong man, the best warrior in the tribe, someone who could provide for and defend her family. If he was good looking, even better. If he fertilized other women, so be it, so long as he looked after the best interests of her family.
That attitude persists today, even though almost everything else in life has changed. Women still want the handsomest, strongest, sexiest guy with demonstrated ability at leadership as he gathers other guys to follow his lead. Anyone who doubts this should check out how girls in the latter years of grade school and in high school tart themselves up for the guys. They may want to be treated as sweet and innocent, but they look and act like hookers because they know what guys like to look at.
No question, guys like to look at attractive women. If they could, they would take every one of them to bed. But they wouldn't necessarily want to spend their lives with them.
If I guy can score with a girl who looks and acts like a hooker, but not have to pay fees, he considers himself a winner. And so would his buddies. But guys don't want to marry hookers, because...they have proven that they have too many other sexual interests. Girls who look like hookers and put out sexual vibes like hookers may get the attention of guys, but those guys don't want to marry them.
The same applies to the captain of the football or basketball team, or any other jock who looks good stripped to...well, stripped. While most girls are attracted to these guys, many have none of the other qualities a woman should be looking for. That "get the best possible male to mate with" attitude persists even though we no longer live in tribes.
The best warrior in the tribe in prehistoric days seldom lived past age 24, almost never past age 30. Since the tribe did much of the teaching of children anyway, getting the best set of genes seemed wise. The warrior would always be busy with matters other than those relating to the family, and women knew that. Today, the same guy would be a terrible person to depend on for personal and family values.
Today, most men live past 30. It's the next 50 or 60 years after that the women who marry them can't stand.
Very few of the skills a young man learns in high school apply to the fulfillment of responsibilities of a family man. We don't teach the skills that families need, that women should be looking for. So young women continue to want the best looking guy they can get. And when they marry and he fails to satisfy the needs of her or their children, they can't figure out why.
The most popular girls and guys in high school get so used to constant attention from members of the opposite sex that they continue to want that attention into college, into their work lives later and into their time as parents. They don't need commitment, they need attention. Girls should want a life partner who gives attention, not one who seeks it from them.
Girls naturally favour men with confidence. Whether in men or women, confidence is the most important characteristic of beautiful people. An average looking person with lots of confidence and a big smile can be a sex symbol. Just look at the stars of movies, only they have the addition of makeup to make them look even more perfect. Brad Pitt may be great for the imagination, but few women could tolerate spending a life with that kind of man.
As great as confidence is--I firmly believe it is critically important to a person's well-being--it does absolutely nothing to make a man a better husband, lover, father, provider or planner. Confidence is but one characteristic of a person. That characteristic can be taught and learned. Most people who have confidence learned it by themselves, though it can be learned by taking classes of various kinds.
Those who don't have confidence in themselves and their abilities and strengths should take a class to learn how to show confidence, to feel confident.
Men need more skills than confidence, good looks and rippling muscles to be good husbands, fathers and long term friends. For a woman to depend on the looks of a man as the main feature she loves and wants would be the same as a man loving a woman because she has breast implants, a tummy tuck, butt rounding, a nose job, reconfigured ears and a hair transplant. Every study ever done shows that most men don't want those features in a wife and mother. A majority of men want "natural" women, no matter if they have body features that are not perfect.
Women shouldn't depend on good looks and popularity as characteristics that will make a man a good husband and father. In fact, nothing about the appearance of a man, good or not so good, can be held as predictors of what he will be like as a husband, lover, father, provider, friend or sleepmate.
Advice to women: When looking for a mate, search for one who has the characteristics you want in a man for what you want to do with him in the years to come. If one you like doesn't have those characteristics, make sure he is the kind of man who will gladly learn what he needs to know. If he won't, look elsewhere, quickly.
Advice to men who have read this far: The same applies to you when looking for a lifemate. Paris Hilton or Salma Hayak or someone with the name of Diaz or Cruz may be great to ogle, but they won't necessarily have the characteristics you want at home. And they will always want the attention they get now from other men.
It's not just a matter of caveat emptor. It's a matter of looking for what you really want rather than wanting someone who looks good but has nothing else to offer that you will find valuable in the years to come.
Think ahead. Unfortunately, most people don't get better with age. If you want a partner that will, look for that characteristic before you settle.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to cope with the needs of their lives instead of depending on television and movies to tell them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
How We Learn To Love An Unhealthy Lifestyle
As I write this I am experiencing a high level of anxiety brought about by stress from many different sources over a period of several weeks, my present purpose being to convey not my feelings but the effects that stress over a long period of time has on my thinking and decision making. The effects of stress on one person can affect another person similarly, if not identically, thus my experience can be a learning situation for you.
I have experienced depression and its effects in the past, though that was cleared entirely by my taking vitamin D supplements to compensate for the lack of sufficient direct sunlight on my skin to allow my body to create vitamin D on its own. The effects of depression bear striking similarities to the effects of stress/anxiety over a long period of time.
With depression I found that triggers would set off a bout of anger for a period of several minutes (up to an hour), then the emotional energy would dissipate and turn into what most of us would call depression. With stress, the anger comes to stay, varying in degree enough that it could often be called intolerance of the behaviour of others, inability to understand the life situations of others (lack of empathy) or a strong desire to get away from the company of specific people, rather than it being labelled easily as anxiety.
My present anxiety caused by long term stress has not resulted in any thoughts of suicide, which depression has done in the past. While I seek relief from the effects of my anxiety, I do not want to resort to easy solutions such as medication, addictive behaviour or the ultimate easy way out, suicide.
Why should you care? One or more people you know (perhaps many) may exhibit the some similar behaviours as I do right now, for the same causes. You may know nothing about the causes of the people you know or my own because we don't talk about them. We only talk about the effects, the bad behaviour, sometimes our own but usually of others who we think act weird or permanently irritable.
Stress has caused me to lose sleep--a considerable amount over a period of weeks--and this could easily compromise my immune system as well as causing me to exhibit symptoms of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation alone could cause irritability, inability to get along with others and a short fuse on the temper. Coupled with long term anxiety it could result in amplified instances of anger, intolerance, not paying attention to the needs of loved ones, not taking proper care of loved ones due to an egocentric attitude, even a desire to generate conditions which could destroy a close relationship just to have something "happen" to give a person the feeling that he or she is in control of something.
Stress can cause loss of sleep, but the sleep loss effects add to the effects of long term anxiety, rather than simply overlapping them. One doubles up with the other, so to speak.
Now we have causes which could result in such well known behaviours as road rage, office rage, marital arguments, marital incompatibility (real or imagined), disconnects in relationships with a person's own children, lack of interest in sex (at least of the softer, gentler, more loving kind), erectile dysfunction, inability to cope with other personal problems, even turning to addictive behaviours or substances for some form of relief.
Enter drugs, prescribed and otherwise. Prozac is the most prescribed drug in North America. Legal and illegal sales of Viagra and Cialis flourish. As many as 25 percent of people in many communities may have used marijuana or one of its derivatives in the past year.
The rates of divorce in most countries of the West hover around or above 50 percent. Examples of physical and emotional abuse surface frequently. Police must deal with family problems on about one-quarter of their calls in many communities. I don't have statistics to show what effect martial problems could have on other socially unacceptable behaviours, such as fights in bars or even theft from employers.
Where do people who suffer from these problems turn to find socially acceptable help to solve their problems? A family doctor will likely prescribe drugs, which solve nothing, merely cover up symptoms. Some--the lucky ones--get referred to counsellors who specialize in helping people who suffer from anxiety symptoms caused by high stress. Unfortunately, that part of the health care community is so fixed on a steady source of income that treatment may not be the best because it's in the financial best interests of the practitioner to have the professional help last as long as possible.
The whole ethic of teaching children about what they must do to "succeed" in the working world prepares them to face and accept stress and long term anxiety, though not how to cope with them.
We teach kids to not just enter the rat race, but to believe that this is the way life is and should be, and that they should learn to "enjoy it" by making as much money as possible and finding as many "interesting" ways of spending it as they can.
This article cannot present instant cures for complex problems. It can only point to the way that those with a concern for solving those problems should turn.
Treat broken adults one by one and we continue with our present kinds of problems. Teach children how to cope with the lives they will live in the future, as adults, and we change the path of the future for our descendants.
Change is possible if we know what we want to achieve and where to begin that change process.
Teach the children.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can cope with their lives as adults better than today's adults can.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
I have experienced depression and its effects in the past, though that was cleared entirely by my taking vitamin D supplements to compensate for the lack of sufficient direct sunlight on my skin to allow my body to create vitamin D on its own. The effects of depression bear striking similarities to the effects of stress/anxiety over a long period of time.
With depression I found that triggers would set off a bout of anger for a period of several minutes (up to an hour), then the emotional energy would dissipate and turn into what most of us would call depression. With stress, the anger comes to stay, varying in degree enough that it could often be called intolerance of the behaviour of others, inability to understand the life situations of others (lack of empathy) or a strong desire to get away from the company of specific people, rather than it being labelled easily as anxiety.
My present anxiety caused by long term stress has not resulted in any thoughts of suicide, which depression has done in the past. While I seek relief from the effects of my anxiety, I do not want to resort to easy solutions such as medication, addictive behaviour or the ultimate easy way out, suicide.
Why should you care? One or more people you know (perhaps many) may exhibit the some similar behaviours as I do right now, for the same causes. You may know nothing about the causes of the people you know or my own because we don't talk about them. We only talk about the effects, the bad behaviour, sometimes our own but usually of others who we think act weird or permanently irritable.
Stress has caused me to lose sleep--a considerable amount over a period of weeks--and this could easily compromise my immune system as well as causing me to exhibit symptoms of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation alone could cause irritability, inability to get along with others and a short fuse on the temper. Coupled with long term anxiety it could result in amplified instances of anger, intolerance, not paying attention to the needs of loved ones, not taking proper care of loved ones due to an egocentric attitude, even a desire to generate conditions which could destroy a close relationship just to have something "happen" to give a person the feeling that he or she is in control of something.
Stress can cause loss of sleep, but the sleep loss effects add to the effects of long term anxiety, rather than simply overlapping them. One doubles up with the other, so to speak.
Now we have causes which could result in such well known behaviours as road rage, office rage, marital arguments, marital incompatibility (real or imagined), disconnects in relationships with a person's own children, lack of interest in sex (at least of the softer, gentler, more loving kind), erectile dysfunction, inability to cope with other personal problems, even turning to addictive behaviours or substances for some form of relief.
Enter drugs, prescribed and otherwise. Prozac is the most prescribed drug in North America. Legal and illegal sales of Viagra and Cialis flourish. As many as 25 percent of people in many communities may have used marijuana or one of its derivatives in the past year.
The rates of divorce in most countries of the West hover around or above 50 percent. Examples of physical and emotional abuse surface frequently. Police must deal with family problems on about one-quarter of their calls in many communities. I don't have statistics to show what effect martial problems could have on other socially unacceptable behaviours, such as fights in bars or even theft from employers.
Where do people who suffer from these problems turn to find socially acceptable help to solve their problems? A family doctor will likely prescribe drugs, which solve nothing, merely cover up symptoms. Some--the lucky ones--get referred to counsellors who specialize in helping people who suffer from anxiety symptoms caused by high stress. Unfortunately, that part of the health care community is so fixed on a steady source of income that treatment may not be the best because it's in the financial best interests of the practitioner to have the professional help last as long as possible.
The whole ethic of teaching children about what they must do to "succeed" in the working world prepares them to face and accept stress and long term anxiety, though not how to cope with them.
We teach kids to not just enter the rat race, but to believe that this is the way life is and should be, and that they should learn to "enjoy it" by making as much money as possible and finding as many "interesting" ways of spending it as they can.
This article cannot present instant cures for complex problems. It can only point to the way that those with a concern for solving those problems should turn.
Treat broken adults one by one and we continue with our present kinds of problems. Teach children how to cope with the lives they will live in the future, as adults, and we change the path of the future for our descendants.
Change is possible if we know what we want to achieve and where to begin that change process.
Teach the children.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can cope with their lives as adults better than today's adults can.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
If Sex Is So Great, Why Does It Screw Up So Many Lives?
Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.
- Carl Sagan, American author and scientist (1934-1996)
Let's deal with the most obvious example of the truth of this quote, marriage.
In most western countries, the rate of failed marriages (as determined by the rate of divorce) hovers around or above fifty percent. That means that at least half of the people who entered the ceremony believing that they were deliriously happy because they had found their soulmate for life were wrong. What they found was beautiful romance which lasted about as long as most romantic relationships, from two to eight months.
Why the huge failure rate? We humans are built for two fundamental kinds of relationships.
Romance worked well for our prehistoric ancestors because it allowed them to find the mates that would produce their children. The other kind was more akin to friendship, a healthy and lasting kind whereby a man and a woman would raise a collection of children, most of which were the direct descendants of one or both of them.
This worked well in tribal conditions where mating happened frequently between various combinations of couples. It wasn't important to the tribe who birthed the children once they were there, it was important that the whole village or band contributed to the raising of them. Having everyone take an interest in raising the children meant that the kids would have built into them the values of the community.
Prisons were non-existent. If punishment was necessary, it was administered often by means of social ostracization from the offended party or from the tribe for a period of time. As everyone knew what everyone else in the tribe was doing most of the time, crime within the tribe was rare. While there might have been fights between men over who would mate with a woman at a given time, there were usually enough females so that each male had one or more of them available. This is true today in bands of our nearest genetic relatives, the great apes.
Even when couples had paired off to live together and to take responsibility for raising the children for which they adopted obligations, mating took place with others. Maybe with others who didn't have mates, maybe with some who did. Of course they didn't copulate around the community campfire. What mattered was that the male and the female came "home" when they were supposed to be home to fulfill their other responsibilities.
Today we continue that pattern, though our religions and our media have tried to pretend that we humans were built for monogamy. We aren't. No species of primate or even of mammal is totally monogamous, according to recent scientific studies. What the animals are is committed to a monogamous home relationship, not a monogamous sexual relationship.
Romance was natural, especially for those in their teens years, because each person looked for the mate who would father or mother their offspring, the strongest and healthiest possible children. As mating and pairing off for living purposes were often two different matters, no one was surprised when the natural mother of a child did not live with the natural father. Living together as a cohesive group was, after all, what the family was all about. Sexual intercourse existed within the family, but was not necessarily restricted to the family.
Judging by what we see on television, the most common reason why marriages break up is sexual infidelity. Yet sex with various different partners was in our genetic and hormonal makeup for tens of thousands of years before religions and the media made us believe in monogamy and sexual fidelity within a marriage.
Do we even today, in what we believe is an advanced condition of humanity, have the tools, the skills and the knowledge to maintain sexual fidelity within a marriage? I submit the unequivocal answer to that is an emphatic No.
Women, especially in the early years of raising children, often do not have enough energy left by the end of the day for their bodies to produce enough hormones to have a strong interest in sex. Every few days, maybe, but not every day for most. The male, however, is built for daily or even more frequent sexual experiences during his years of maximum sexual strength.
As the male gets older and adopts more responsibilities, it's apt to be him who loses the energy battle, resulting in insufficient body strength to produce hormones to have regular interest in sex. While the male reaches his sexual peak around age 27, when his body tells him to have sex with every female he can get his penis into in order to spread his genes around, the female doesn't reach her sexual peak until at least age 33, sometimes several years later. When the male's interest in frequent sex is slowing, the female is more rarin' to go than ever before in her life. By then her kids may be past the high maintenance stage so she has more energy.
We don't have the social structures to match our rising and falling sexual interests (pun noted, I almost said mate our interests) with our basic physical needs. This is the environment into which we place "Till death do us part." And the public social commandment of sexual monogamy (which has never, ever, been widely accepted in private).
Where does emotion come into this? In this case, the response to a rush of hormones is what we call romance, which is a strong emotion. We can be madly in love with someone we want to mate with because that's how our hormones cause us to react.
As you can easily see, our social structures are not equipped to deal with public social demands which do not jibe with private hormonal/emotional needs. This gap will not soon be resolved or closed. We are in the midst of trying to cope with a chasm that has opened up now, but not ready to put the broken social fabric back together into a new form of arrangement that is as widely accepted as the old arrangement was in our tribal times of the past. The old one won't work and we don't have a new arrangement ready to take its place.
We are in the midst of a transition period in human history, in many ways, but one of the most important regards our interpersonal relationships. No one knows how it will shake out. Right now it seems chaotic.
The best we can do as parents is to make our children aware of the realities of this human condition and to give them the social, emotional and family tools and skills to manage their personal affairs with their heads up, knowing what to expect. And being prepared for what to do when they reach each stage of a relationship with another person.
We may one day end up with three phases to our adult lives, first romance and mating, second the raising of children (families) and the third a pairing for living together through old age. There is evidence for the beginnings of that possible structure for the future even now.
It's exciting if you see the transition happening before your eyes around the world. Scary as hell if you don't realize that our species is in the midst of a transition which will likely firm up long after we who read this are all dead. We need to see the big picture.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their growing children to be ready to face head-on and to cope with the changes that will happen in their lives as they pass through adolescence into adulthood and beyond that into old age.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Carl Sagan, American author and scientist (1934-1996)
Let's deal with the most obvious example of the truth of this quote, marriage.
In most western countries, the rate of failed marriages (as determined by the rate of divorce) hovers around or above fifty percent. That means that at least half of the people who entered the ceremony believing that they were deliriously happy because they had found their soulmate for life were wrong. What they found was beautiful romance which lasted about as long as most romantic relationships, from two to eight months.
Why the huge failure rate? We humans are built for two fundamental kinds of relationships.
Romance worked well for our prehistoric ancestors because it allowed them to find the mates that would produce their children. The other kind was more akin to friendship, a healthy and lasting kind whereby a man and a woman would raise a collection of children, most of which were the direct descendants of one or both of them.
This worked well in tribal conditions where mating happened frequently between various combinations of couples. It wasn't important to the tribe who birthed the children once they were there, it was important that the whole village or band contributed to the raising of them. Having everyone take an interest in raising the children meant that the kids would have built into them the values of the community.
Prisons were non-existent. If punishment was necessary, it was administered often by means of social ostracization from the offended party or from the tribe for a period of time. As everyone knew what everyone else in the tribe was doing most of the time, crime within the tribe was rare. While there might have been fights between men over who would mate with a woman at a given time, there were usually enough females so that each male had one or more of them available. This is true today in bands of our nearest genetic relatives, the great apes.
Even when couples had paired off to live together and to take responsibility for raising the children for which they adopted obligations, mating took place with others. Maybe with others who didn't have mates, maybe with some who did. Of course they didn't copulate around the community campfire. What mattered was that the male and the female came "home" when they were supposed to be home to fulfill their other responsibilities.
Today we continue that pattern, though our religions and our media have tried to pretend that we humans were built for monogamy. We aren't. No species of primate or even of mammal is totally monogamous, according to recent scientific studies. What the animals are is committed to a monogamous home relationship, not a monogamous sexual relationship.
Romance was natural, especially for those in their teens years, because each person looked for the mate who would father or mother their offspring, the strongest and healthiest possible children. As mating and pairing off for living purposes were often two different matters, no one was surprised when the natural mother of a child did not live with the natural father. Living together as a cohesive group was, after all, what the family was all about. Sexual intercourse existed within the family, but was not necessarily restricted to the family.
Judging by what we see on television, the most common reason why marriages break up is sexual infidelity. Yet sex with various different partners was in our genetic and hormonal makeup for tens of thousands of years before religions and the media made us believe in monogamy and sexual fidelity within a marriage.
Do we even today, in what we believe is an advanced condition of humanity, have the tools, the skills and the knowledge to maintain sexual fidelity within a marriage? I submit the unequivocal answer to that is an emphatic No.
Women, especially in the early years of raising children, often do not have enough energy left by the end of the day for their bodies to produce enough hormones to have a strong interest in sex. Every few days, maybe, but not every day for most. The male, however, is built for daily or even more frequent sexual experiences during his years of maximum sexual strength.
As the male gets older and adopts more responsibilities, it's apt to be him who loses the energy battle, resulting in insufficient body strength to produce hormones to have regular interest in sex. While the male reaches his sexual peak around age 27, when his body tells him to have sex with every female he can get his penis into in order to spread his genes around, the female doesn't reach her sexual peak until at least age 33, sometimes several years later. When the male's interest in frequent sex is slowing, the female is more rarin' to go than ever before in her life. By then her kids may be past the high maintenance stage so she has more energy.
We don't have the social structures to match our rising and falling sexual interests (pun noted, I almost said mate our interests) with our basic physical needs. This is the environment into which we place "Till death do us part." And the public social commandment of sexual monogamy (which has never, ever, been widely accepted in private).
Where does emotion come into this? In this case, the response to a rush of hormones is what we call romance, which is a strong emotion. We can be madly in love with someone we want to mate with because that's how our hormones cause us to react.
As you can easily see, our social structures are not equipped to deal with public social demands which do not jibe with private hormonal/emotional needs. This gap will not soon be resolved or closed. We are in the midst of trying to cope with a chasm that has opened up now, but not ready to put the broken social fabric back together into a new form of arrangement that is as widely accepted as the old arrangement was in our tribal times of the past. The old one won't work and we don't have a new arrangement ready to take its place.
We are in the midst of a transition period in human history, in many ways, but one of the most important regards our interpersonal relationships. No one knows how it will shake out. Right now it seems chaotic.
The best we can do as parents is to make our children aware of the realities of this human condition and to give them the social, emotional and family tools and skills to manage their personal affairs with their heads up, knowing what to expect. And being prepared for what to do when they reach each stage of a relationship with another person.
We may one day end up with three phases to our adult lives, first romance and mating, second the raising of children (families) and the third a pairing for living together through old age. There is evidence for the beginnings of that possible structure for the future even now.
It's exciting if you see the transition happening before your eyes around the world. Scary as hell if you don't realize that our species is in the midst of a transition which will likely firm up long after we who read this are all dead. We need to see the big picture.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their growing children to be ready to face head-on and to cope with the changes that will happen in their lives as they pass through adolescence into adulthood and beyond that into old age.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, May 03, 2008
How To Avoid Marriage Failure
When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce.Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person.But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and zen master, author of Being Peace
Note that the monk stresses that blaming does no good at all. Neither does it help to adopt blame for something ourselves. Blaming is not a winning strategy in relationships.
At the time of breakup of a marriage, seldom does it happen that one of the couple admits to having done wrong. When it happens, the one who admits having done wrong usually has some excuse that is valid to him or her, usually that the other has abandoned him or her physically or emotionally and he or she committed some unacceptable behaviour out of need. In a majority of cases, each blames the other for something.
In some cases, the couple chooses the middle path, counselling. Someone with a certificate in something--usually marriage counselling--interrogates each individual of the couple to find what behaviours could be changed in order to reduce the stress or improve the interaction between them. That's "using reason and argument." Sometimes it works, but the success rate is not high.
Thich says that "if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well." In other words, if we know how to take care of each other, our relationship will grow.
Very nice. Glib. The divorce rates in industrial countries (above fifty percent in almost every case) gives evidence that we don't know how to take care of each other. Without that key element, knowing how to take care of each other, we have little hope of forming a long term successful relationship. Where do we learn this skill, this knowledge?
To be fair, some do learn on the job. They muddle through the rough patches to form something wonderful, as if they knew what to do in the first place. Few do.
In no society I know are the guides for forming and cementing successful relationships taught to everyone. Ideally they should be taught to children, as young as possible. Preferably at the sandbox age. That's the age when many people learn the value of friendships, at least of having allies as opposed to enemies.
Not long after the sandbox age kids form friendships if they can, temporary alliances if they can't make friends. The temporary allies are still called friends. The friends that are really allies are more like buddies that share similar interests, even if those interests include protecting themselves from a mutual enemy or bully.
What's the difference between allies/buddies and real friends? It's the same difference as between those who form successful marriage relationships and those whose marriages break down when the two people "grow apart." It's a question of who is more important.
That's not the Who is the head of the household? question, but Who is more important to each member of the couple? If each member believes himself or herself more important, that his or her own best interests must be maintained as higher priority than the other, the two are buddies, allies. It's effectively a business relationship marriage. Businesses fail.
When both individuals believe that the best interests of the other are more important than their own, the marriage will likely succeed. The friendship will last.
"What happens to you affects me, so it's in my best interests to see that you have a happy, successful and fulfilling life." Don't blame the lettuce. Learn how to grow it so that it becomes more valuable.
The lettuce will appreciate it and reward you greatly. In human terms, that reward continues throughout the lifetime.
When you are the more important person in a relationship, more important to yourself, then your relationship is like a business association. Buddies. Allies that help each other, but always have their own bests interests at heart.
That's a pretty simple lesson to teach to children. Very hard to teach to adults. Most kids don't receive that as a consciously and proactively taught lesson.
Unless they have been taught that lesson, most kids will grow up believing that their own best interests are what they should keep in mind most of the time. That's what nature teaches them. Marriages where one or both parties believe that will eventually fail. Worse, one or both parents will be blamed by the kids and they will grow to do the same in their own marriages.
Stop the endless cycle. Teach the children.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can handle successful relationships as adults. The world doesn't need more buddy marriages.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and zen master, author of Being Peace
Note that the monk stresses that blaming does no good at all. Neither does it help to adopt blame for something ourselves. Blaming is not a winning strategy in relationships.
At the time of breakup of a marriage, seldom does it happen that one of the couple admits to having done wrong. When it happens, the one who admits having done wrong usually has some excuse that is valid to him or her, usually that the other has abandoned him or her physically or emotionally and he or she committed some unacceptable behaviour out of need. In a majority of cases, each blames the other for something.
In some cases, the couple chooses the middle path, counselling. Someone with a certificate in something--usually marriage counselling--interrogates each individual of the couple to find what behaviours could be changed in order to reduce the stress or improve the interaction between them. That's "using reason and argument." Sometimes it works, but the success rate is not high.
Thich says that "if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well." In other words, if we know how to take care of each other, our relationship will grow.
Very nice. Glib. The divorce rates in industrial countries (above fifty percent in almost every case) gives evidence that we don't know how to take care of each other. Without that key element, knowing how to take care of each other, we have little hope of forming a long term successful relationship. Where do we learn this skill, this knowledge?
To be fair, some do learn on the job. They muddle through the rough patches to form something wonderful, as if they knew what to do in the first place. Few do.
In no society I know are the guides for forming and cementing successful relationships taught to everyone. Ideally they should be taught to children, as young as possible. Preferably at the sandbox age. That's the age when many people learn the value of friendships, at least of having allies as opposed to enemies.
Not long after the sandbox age kids form friendships if they can, temporary alliances if they can't make friends. The temporary allies are still called friends. The friends that are really allies are more like buddies that share similar interests, even if those interests include protecting themselves from a mutual enemy or bully.
What's the difference between allies/buddies and real friends? It's the same difference as between those who form successful marriage relationships and those whose marriages break down when the two people "grow apart." It's a question of who is more important.
That's not the Who is the head of the household? question, but Who is more important to each member of the couple? If each member believes himself or herself more important, that his or her own best interests must be maintained as higher priority than the other, the two are buddies, allies. It's effectively a business relationship marriage. Businesses fail.
When both individuals believe that the best interests of the other are more important than their own, the marriage will likely succeed. The friendship will last.
"What happens to you affects me, so it's in my best interests to see that you have a happy, successful and fulfilling life." Don't blame the lettuce. Learn how to grow it so that it becomes more valuable.
The lettuce will appreciate it and reward you greatly. In human terms, that reward continues throughout the lifetime.
When you are the more important person in a relationship, more important to yourself, then your relationship is like a business association. Buddies. Allies that help each other, but always have their own bests interests at heart.
That's a pretty simple lesson to teach to children. Very hard to teach to adults. Most kids don't receive that as a consciously and proactively taught lesson.
Unless they have been taught that lesson, most kids will grow up believing that their own best interests are what they should keep in mind most of the time. That's what nature teaches them. Marriages where one or both parties believe that will eventually fail. Worse, one or both parents will be blamed by the kids and they will grow to do the same in their own marriages.
Stop the endless cycle. Teach the children.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can handle successful relationships as adults. The world doesn't need more buddy marriages.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The Secret Of Love
Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
- François Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), letter to Count Schomberg, August 1769
As admirable as Voltaire's reasoning ability was and as impressive his observations about human nature, I wonder how he reached the conclusion that animals know nothing of the power of life.
An avowed dog person for most of my life, I became servant to a household cat some 18 years ago. Since then my wife and I have had two other cats, one of which has epilepsy and has gone deaf.
The most impressive--dare I say shocking--lesson I have learned in my years of observing the behaviour of cats is that they are remarkably similar to humans in their needs. I don't mean just the needs for food, shelter and security, which all living things share.
Our cats do hear our grandmother clock strike because it gongs on the hour and half-hour. It means nothing to them because neither the ticking of the clock nor the gong itself serve any purpose toward satisfying their needs.
What does a clock add to our lives? At most it serves as a reminder that we must perform actions, usually in the service of others. Cats can be altruistic at times, but they are clearly not into servitude. Cats would have disappointed Pavlov.
Our cats know when they want to be fed because they are hungry. If they aren't hungry, they don't care if food is available to them or not. They don't overeat, nor do they eat in front of the television. They will, however, eat as a form of comfort, if their problem is not of a severely emotional nature.
They clearly know when they need to be touched (petted). Not only do they make their needs known to the petters, they allow little to stand in the way of their satisfying that need when they have it, if humans are around. They prefer petting from the humans they know, but will accept it from strangers who happen around at the right time.
Humans do not do that. We seldom know when we need to be touched by another, even though it's a need so fundamental to us that regular lack of touch can alter our personality.
Children almost never come to mommy demanding to be held. They may come, but they don't ask in words. The closest they come to asking is when they hurt themselves. Being held by mommy when they hurt does nothing to help the hurt, it's a way of (an excuse for) demanding to be touched without using words (we don't use words to express that need, sad to say).
Voltaire says that animals have no idea of death. I disagree. When our epileptic cat has a petit or grand mal seizure, he wants to be alone in an enclosed area, secure that he won't explode all over the place. However, for days before and after the seizure, he seeks touch and comfort many times each day. He knows when he will have a seizure, days ahead. He seeks the security he wants and needs ahead of time.
People seldom know they are about to have an epileptic seizure until it happens, or maybe just a brief period before. Cats are more sensitive to their bodies. Most of the time they do what they must to heal themselves. Only their owners insist upon taking them to vets.
For months before our oldest cat died, she came to me many times each day, to sit on my lap or to cuddle in the crook of my arm as I lied in bed napping. This was uncharacteristic behaviour for that cat, though it isn't for the epileptic one now. I don't doubt that they would know when the end of their life is near. Maybe they don't dream of heaven, but who knows?
Voltaire's reference to the clock striking, of course, refers to the death knell, not to the regular striking of a gong or ticking of the pendulum. His point is that we make much of a charade of death, most of which serves no real purpose but to make the grieving ones feel worse.
My point differs from Voltaire's in that I want us to pay attention to the characteristics and needs of animals that we share with them, but that they do better than us.
We know that dogs and cats love to be petted. We call them pets for that reason. They need touch and they demand it from those who can best provide it. To a dog or cat, brushing the fur is nothing more than another way for them to be touched.
We need to recognize our own need for touch. Life without touch is not easy and life with a decreasing amount of touch from a loved one is even harder because we feel the lack of touch and our increase in need. The death of a spouse may be hardest on those who benefitted most from loving touch from the dead mate for many years.
Hospitals (not all) and nursing homes have found the benefits of having people with pets visit so that patients can touch them. Nurses stroke their patients and touch them more than ever in the past because it helps the patients to feel better, even to heal faster in some cases.
Voltaire's quotation was not about animals after all, but about satisfying our own real needs instead of trying to play act unnecessary stuff while ignoring what is really important.
Now, while you think about it, go give someone you love a hug. Do it several times a day if you can. Don't miss a day.
One of the mysteries of love is that we can't measure it. Think not? Most of us, without being aware of it, measure how much others love us by the amount of loving touch we receive from them.
Remember, it's not just the amount of touch we receive from others that's important. It's just as important to those we love that we give loving touch to them so that they can keep track of how much we love them. It works both days. We measure love by the amount of touch we receive, they measure love by the amount they receive.
Now you can understand why the so-called Empty Nest syndrome of parents whose children have grown and left home can be so severe. And why people who consider divorce do so because their partners and they have "grown apart."
Love is an emotional word we use to describe our basic need for loving touch. Celibate nuns and priests receive little human touch, but when they devote their lives to God and to prayer the parts of their brains that trigger the feel-good response activate the same way that ours does when we are hugged by a loved one. Loving God fully can give people the same physical effect as receiving loving touch.
So, have you hugged someone yet?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow balanced and well loved children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- François Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), letter to Count Schomberg, August 1769
As admirable as Voltaire's reasoning ability was and as impressive his observations about human nature, I wonder how he reached the conclusion that animals know nothing of the power of life.
An avowed dog person for most of my life, I became servant to a household cat some 18 years ago. Since then my wife and I have had two other cats, one of which has epilepsy and has gone deaf.
The most impressive--dare I say shocking--lesson I have learned in my years of observing the behaviour of cats is that they are remarkably similar to humans in their needs. I don't mean just the needs for food, shelter and security, which all living things share.
Our cats do hear our grandmother clock strike because it gongs on the hour and half-hour. It means nothing to them because neither the ticking of the clock nor the gong itself serve any purpose toward satisfying their needs.
What does a clock add to our lives? At most it serves as a reminder that we must perform actions, usually in the service of others. Cats can be altruistic at times, but they are clearly not into servitude. Cats would have disappointed Pavlov.
Our cats know when they want to be fed because they are hungry. If they aren't hungry, they don't care if food is available to them or not. They don't overeat, nor do they eat in front of the television. They will, however, eat as a form of comfort, if their problem is not of a severely emotional nature.
They clearly know when they need to be touched (petted). Not only do they make their needs known to the petters, they allow little to stand in the way of their satisfying that need when they have it, if humans are around. They prefer petting from the humans they know, but will accept it from strangers who happen around at the right time.
Humans do not do that. We seldom know when we need to be touched by another, even though it's a need so fundamental to us that regular lack of touch can alter our personality.
Children almost never come to mommy demanding to be held. They may come, but they don't ask in words. The closest they come to asking is when they hurt themselves. Being held by mommy when they hurt does nothing to help the hurt, it's a way of (an excuse for) demanding to be touched without using words (we don't use words to express that need, sad to say).
Voltaire says that animals have no idea of death. I disagree. When our epileptic cat has a petit or grand mal seizure, he wants to be alone in an enclosed area, secure that he won't explode all over the place. However, for days before and after the seizure, he seeks touch and comfort many times each day. He knows when he will have a seizure, days ahead. He seeks the security he wants and needs ahead of time.
People seldom know they are about to have an epileptic seizure until it happens, or maybe just a brief period before. Cats are more sensitive to their bodies. Most of the time they do what they must to heal themselves. Only their owners insist upon taking them to vets.
For months before our oldest cat died, she came to me many times each day, to sit on my lap or to cuddle in the crook of my arm as I lied in bed napping. This was uncharacteristic behaviour for that cat, though it isn't for the epileptic one now. I don't doubt that they would know when the end of their life is near. Maybe they don't dream of heaven, but who knows?
Voltaire's reference to the clock striking, of course, refers to the death knell, not to the regular striking of a gong or ticking of the pendulum. His point is that we make much of a charade of death, most of which serves no real purpose but to make the grieving ones feel worse.
My point differs from Voltaire's in that I want us to pay attention to the characteristics and needs of animals that we share with them, but that they do better than us.
We know that dogs and cats love to be petted. We call them pets for that reason. They need touch and they demand it from those who can best provide it. To a dog or cat, brushing the fur is nothing more than another way for them to be touched.
We need to recognize our own need for touch. Life without touch is not easy and life with a decreasing amount of touch from a loved one is even harder because we feel the lack of touch and our increase in need. The death of a spouse may be hardest on those who benefitted most from loving touch from the dead mate for many years.
Hospitals (not all) and nursing homes have found the benefits of having people with pets visit so that patients can touch them. Nurses stroke their patients and touch them more than ever in the past because it helps the patients to feel better, even to heal faster in some cases.
Voltaire's quotation was not about animals after all, but about satisfying our own real needs instead of trying to play act unnecessary stuff while ignoring what is really important.
Now, while you think about it, go give someone you love a hug. Do it several times a day if you can. Don't miss a day.
One of the mysteries of love is that we can't measure it. Think not? Most of us, without being aware of it, measure how much others love us by the amount of loving touch we receive from them.
Remember, it's not just the amount of touch we receive from others that's important. It's just as important to those we love that we give loving touch to them so that they can keep track of how much we love them. It works both days. We measure love by the amount of touch we receive, they measure love by the amount they receive.
Now you can understand why the so-called Empty Nest syndrome of parents whose children have grown and left home can be so severe. And why people who consider divorce do so because their partners and they have "grown apart."
Love is an emotional word we use to describe our basic need for loving touch. Celibate nuns and priests receive little human touch, but when they devote their lives to God and to prayer the parts of their brains that trigger the feel-good response activate the same way that ours does when we are hugged by a loved one. Loving God fully can give people the same physical effect as receiving loving touch.
So, have you hugged someone yet?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow balanced and well loved children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Pay Attention: It's Like Gold
Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.
- Jim Rohn, motivational speaker, philosopher and entrepreneur
The fastest way to make people like you is to give them the gift of your attention. That's attention without distraction, without doing something else at the same time.
Listen to what they have to say and look them in the face while they are speaking. Don't stare because that indicates you have become distracted by something other than the words being spoken. Such as a pimple, a scratch, the colour of the other person's eyes or something that doesn't belong on his or her face. Staring is bad because it achieves the opposite effect to making them like you.
You don't have to look the person directly in the face, at the same spot--such as the eyes, or one eye--for long. A sentence or two should be enough. Then look somewhere else nearby, briefly, to give the impression that you are thinking about what the person said.
Then look back at the face.
In order to give the impression that you are paying attention, you have to actually pay attention. You must pay attention because you will need to add a comment, ask a question or suggest something that indicates you are considering what has been said. Since you won't care about making someone you dislike or have little respect for like you, you needn't fear that you will give the wrong person the wrong impression.
People like when others pay attention to them. We live in a busy world where seldom enough does it happen.
What happens when you pay close attention to what someone is saying--someone physically close enough to you so that he or she knows you are paying close attention--is that the self esteem of the person rises. Even a self confident person feels gratification when someone unexpectedly pays attention to them.
People like others who raise their self esteem. That can be your opening for friendship.
It's also worth remembering that allowing yourself to be distracted while someone is speaking, especially paying attention to someone who has interrupted your conversation, is a great turn-off. Self esteem plummets when in the middle of speaking someone who has been listening suddenly turns away to give attention to an interloper. You might as well say to that person's face "I don't like you and I don't respect you."
Giving your attention to someone is relatively easy. You can repeat it for those you see regularly, if you want to ramp up your relationships with them. For those you will never see again, you will have been a bright spot in their day. They will remember you the next time they see you, if you cross paths again.
When you end each conversation, be sure to smile. Leave the person on a high note, a smile and some sort of wish for their welfare.
If it works into the event, touch the person briefly on the arm as you say goodbye. Touch is another indicator of liking and of wanting to enhance the relationship.
Next time you see that person, offer something from the previous conversation to indicate you considered their words valuable enough to think about when you were apart. It need only be something brief, an enhancement of something the other person said. Then move on to another topic because neither of you will want to rehash the same conversation.
At some point, if you want to make that person a friend, you must offer something of value to him or her. If that offering relates somehow to spending of money, you are telling the person that your relationship is based on a kind of friendly business association. Such casual friendships evaporate when two people no longer see each other frequently.
Most new relationships that begin with people intending to find a mate fall apart because they are largely based on something relating to money, not on the value of the people to each other. For example, if a guy begins a relationship with a woman by buying a dinner and buying a movie, the woman will feel that her interest is being bought. If there is nothing more personal to the date--even if it includes sex--the relationship likely won't go anywhere because it's fundamentally a gigolo-prostitute association.
To make it a more meaningful relationship, you will need to offer something more valuable than money, your time. That may involve your skill, such as help to put up a chandelier and attach the wiring, or it may involve just your time and effort, such as helping the person accomplish something he or she is having difficulty with. Or help to do something the person wants company doing.
Making a new friend is not hard if you know the techniques. What is much harder is to be able to figure out whether the person is worthy of being your friend. And, more important to that person, whether you are worthy of being his or her friend. Remember, if you want the other person to want to be your friend, you must offer value to that person as well as that person must for you.
In any successful relationship, each person usually feels that they contribute more to its success than the other does. That's natural because we can seldom know all of what the other friend does for us. It just seems unbalanced.
In a marriage, that apparent imbalance may seem as high as 80-20, with each person believing that they contribute 80 percent to the success of the relationship. That's how much most of us miss of what our spouse does for us and to contribute to our security, our welfare and our comfort.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers about what they need to know regarding child development, how important each kind of development is and when to tweak each. It's the handbook everyone needs.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Jim Rohn, motivational speaker, philosopher and entrepreneur
The fastest way to make people like you is to give them the gift of your attention. That's attention without distraction, without doing something else at the same time.
Listen to what they have to say and look them in the face while they are speaking. Don't stare because that indicates you have become distracted by something other than the words being spoken. Such as a pimple, a scratch, the colour of the other person's eyes or something that doesn't belong on his or her face. Staring is bad because it achieves the opposite effect to making them like you.
You don't have to look the person directly in the face, at the same spot--such as the eyes, or one eye--for long. A sentence or two should be enough. Then look somewhere else nearby, briefly, to give the impression that you are thinking about what the person said.
Then look back at the face.
In order to give the impression that you are paying attention, you have to actually pay attention. You must pay attention because you will need to add a comment, ask a question or suggest something that indicates you are considering what has been said. Since you won't care about making someone you dislike or have little respect for like you, you needn't fear that you will give the wrong person the wrong impression.
People like when others pay attention to them. We live in a busy world where seldom enough does it happen.
What happens when you pay close attention to what someone is saying--someone physically close enough to you so that he or she knows you are paying close attention--is that the self esteem of the person rises. Even a self confident person feels gratification when someone unexpectedly pays attention to them.
People like others who raise their self esteem. That can be your opening for friendship.
It's also worth remembering that allowing yourself to be distracted while someone is speaking, especially paying attention to someone who has interrupted your conversation, is a great turn-off. Self esteem plummets when in the middle of speaking someone who has been listening suddenly turns away to give attention to an interloper. You might as well say to that person's face "I don't like you and I don't respect you."
Giving your attention to someone is relatively easy. You can repeat it for those you see regularly, if you want to ramp up your relationships with them. For those you will never see again, you will have been a bright spot in their day. They will remember you the next time they see you, if you cross paths again.
When you end each conversation, be sure to smile. Leave the person on a high note, a smile and some sort of wish for their welfare.
If it works into the event, touch the person briefly on the arm as you say goodbye. Touch is another indicator of liking and of wanting to enhance the relationship.
Next time you see that person, offer something from the previous conversation to indicate you considered their words valuable enough to think about when you were apart. It need only be something brief, an enhancement of something the other person said. Then move on to another topic because neither of you will want to rehash the same conversation.
At some point, if you want to make that person a friend, you must offer something of value to him or her. If that offering relates somehow to spending of money, you are telling the person that your relationship is based on a kind of friendly business association. Such casual friendships evaporate when two people no longer see each other frequently.
Most new relationships that begin with people intending to find a mate fall apart because they are largely based on something relating to money, not on the value of the people to each other. For example, if a guy begins a relationship with a woman by buying a dinner and buying a movie, the woman will feel that her interest is being bought. If there is nothing more personal to the date--even if it includes sex--the relationship likely won't go anywhere because it's fundamentally a gigolo-prostitute association.
To make it a more meaningful relationship, you will need to offer something more valuable than money, your time. That may involve your skill, such as help to put up a chandelier and attach the wiring, or it may involve just your time and effort, such as helping the person accomplish something he or she is having difficulty with. Or help to do something the person wants company doing.
Making a new friend is not hard if you know the techniques. What is much harder is to be able to figure out whether the person is worthy of being your friend. And, more important to that person, whether you are worthy of being his or her friend. Remember, if you want the other person to want to be your friend, you must offer value to that person as well as that person must for you.
In any successful relationship, each person usually feels that they contribute more to its success than the other does. That's natural because we can seldom know all of what the other friend does for us. It just seems unbalanced.
In a marriage, that apparent imbalance may seem as high as 80-20, with each person believing that they contribute 80 percent to the success of the relationship. That's how much most of us miss of what our spouse does for us and to contribute to our security, our welfare and our comfort.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers about what they need to know regarding child development, how important each kind of development is and when to tweak each. It's the handbook everyone needs.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, March 08, 2008
We Turn Helpless People Into Losers
Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.
- Harry Emerson Fosdick, American clergyman (1878-1969)
While this advice holds great importance to those about to retire or who will retire within the next 20 years, it also has great importance on a broader scale.
In the middle decades of the past century, when retirement with some sort of pension at age 65 became common, working people looked forward for decades (in some cases) to the days when they could go on permanent vacation. Retirement as long term vacation was such a goal that it prompted many entrepreneurs to devise ways to syphon money from those with lots of time and not enough to do.
Only a few decades of that retirement-as-vacation thinking passed before the younger generations began to realize that something was wrong. Retirees who kicked back and relaxed, read the newspaper and dabbled around the backyard pool didn't last long.
In fact, many became television addicts, the most devoted of viewers of game shows and soap operas. These allowed their minds to atrophy along with their bodies.
One study just a few years ago showed that those who subscribed to the retirement-as-permanent-vacation line of thinking lived an average of six years past their 65th birthday.
Today society encourages retired people to get active, get moving, get involved and get thinking in many ways. As a consequence, the average lifespan in most western countries is now at or above 80 years, about a decade longer than those who subscribed to the permanent vacation thinking.
Those about to retire are now encouraged to consider the years they spend away form their primary source of income before age 65 to make their next few decades into a "second life," whether that be to start a new business, do volunteer work, participate in a mentoring program or to get involved with helping still older people or others with physical problems that prevent them from getting around and involved with the possibilities of life.
We see retirement now as a major change of life and lifestyle. That requires preparation and planning.
We tend to give less attention to those who must make other major life changes earlier. When a business or industry closes, putting many people out of work, only then do we scramble around to provide the newly unemployed with training to get new jobs. Many people who get fired or laid off have no idea what to do with themselves. Their lives and those of their families suffer as a result.
Only after people experience divorce or death of a spouse do we try to provide some guidance as to how to cope with their loss and how to "begin again." And only then for the fortunate ones who happen to have associations with organizations that offer such services.
For people who experience emotional collapse, very little exists other than basic medical help. In a fast-paced high-stress society, emotional collapse should rank much higher on our radar as a possibility. We could help to prepare people to cope with the stressors of their lives ahead of time, but mostly we just hope that they will survive and get their lives straightened around on their own.
Divorce and job loss have become so common that we should prepare people to cope with the changes when they happen. The emotional shock would be much less severe if people knew that it would happen and what to do when it does. (Preparing them to avoid the need for divorce in the first place is another issue entirely.)
What in the 1970s and 1980s was called the male mid-life crisis has not lessened, but it has almost fallen off our social radar. Many people have enough life and work experience by the middle years of their working lives that they would dearly love to do something different. Often this involves starting their own business, working for themselves.
Not only would this open up more jobs for employment to younger people, it would also fill many voids in our business spectrum now, positions that would never be filled by industries or larger businesses.
First we need to teach young adults that they will likely find themselves out of a job some day and that they will need to know what to do when that happens. Then we need to provide them with the possible tools and training so that they will be able to make the transition as smoothly as possible. That's the kind of preparation that the quote suggests.
People who desperately want to leave their mates need training as well. Many will not leave because they fear being alone in the world with no support and few possibilities. Some suffer abuse because they don't know how to build new lives for themselves on their own.
As Fosdick said--or as I would add as a corollary--these people need to know what they can move to, not just what they want to run away from. By not making people aware of the possibilities (and providing shelters where the abused can go for immediate support), we make the lives of many people worse by leaving them to fend for themselves. Most simply don't know what to do or where to turn.
The first step in their conversion to a new way of thinking about the lives of our people is to teach them that events such as death of a loved one, job loss and divorce will very likely happen to them at some point in their lives. When enough people know this, others will organize tools and training sessions by which everyone will eventually know how to cope with sudden unplanned changes in life.
If we're going to live longer, we will experience major life changes more often than our ancestors. It's time to grow up as societies and offer what our people need so that everyone knows how to cope with problems without turning to harmful alternatives such as drugs, addictions such as gambling, or abuse of loved ones.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a hands-on manual for parents and teachers to show what kids need, when they need it and why meeting those needs must not be an option as it is today.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Harry Emerson Fosdick, American clergyman (1878-1969)
While this advice holds great importance to those about to retire or who will retire within the next 20 years, it also has great importance on a broader scale.
In the middle decades of the past century, when retirement with some sort of pension at age 65 became common, working people looked forward for decades (in some cases) to the days when they could go on permanent vacation. Retirement as long term vacation was such a goal that it prompted many entrepreneurs to devise ways to syphon money from those with lots of time and not enough to do.
Only a few decades of that retirement-as-vacation thinking passed before the younger generations began to realize that something was wrong. Retirees who kicked back and relaxed, read the newspaper and dabbled around the backyard pool didn't last long.
In fact, many became television addicts, the most devoted of viewers of game shows and soap operas. These allowed their minds to atrophy along with their bodies.
One study just a few years ago showed that those who subscribed to the retirement-as-permanent-vacation line of thinking lived an average of six years past their 65th birthday.
Today society encourages retired people to get active, get moving, get involved and get thinking in many ways. As a consequence, the average lifespan in most western countries is now at or above 80 years, about a decade longer than those who subscribed to the permanent vacation thinking.
Those about to retire are now encouraged to consider the years they spend away form their primary source of income before age 65 to make their next few decades into a "second life," whether that be to start a new business, do volunteer work, participate in a mentoring program or to get involved with helping still older people or others with physical problems that prevent them from getting around and involved with the possibilities of life.
We see retirement now as a major change of life and lifestyle. That requires preparation and planning.
We tend to give less attention to those who must make other major life changes earlier. When a business or industry closes, putting many people out of work, only then do we scramble around to provide the newly unemployed with training to get new jobs. Many people who get fired or laid off have no idea what to do with themselves. Their lives and those of their families suffer as a result.
Only after people experience divorce or death of a spouse do we try to provide some guidance as to how to cope with their loss and how to "begin again." And only then for the fortunate ones who happen to have associations with organizations that offer such services.
For people who experience emotional collapse, very little exists other than basic medical help. In a fast-paced high-stress society, emotional collapse should rank much higher on our radar as a possibility. We could help to prepare people to cope with the stressors of their lives ahead of time, but mostly we just hope that they will survive and get their lives straightened around on their own.
Divorce and job loss have become so common that we should prepare people to cope with the changes when they happen. The emotional shock would be much less severe if people knew that it would happen and what to do when it does. (Preparing them to avoid the need for divorce in the first place is another issue entirely.)
What in the 1970s and 1980s was called the male mid-life crisis has not lessened, but it has almost fallen off our social radar. Many people have enough life and work experience by the middle years of their working lives that they would dearly love to do something different. Often this involves starting their own business, working for themselves.
Not only would this open up more jobs for employment to younger people, it would also fill many voids in our business spectrum now, positions that would never be filled by industries or larger businesses.
First we need to teach young adults that they will likely find themselves out of a job some day and that they will need to know what to do when that happens. Then we need to provide them with the possible tools and training so that they will be able to make the transition as smoothly as possible. That's the kind of preparation that the quote suggests.
People who desperately want to leave their mates need training as well. Many will not leave because they fear being alone in the world with no support and few possibilities. Some suffer abuse because they don't know how to build new lives for themselves on their own.
As Fosdick said--or as I would add as a corollary--these people need to know what they can move to, not just what they want to run away from. By not making people aware of the possibilities (and providing shelters where the abused can go for immediate support), we make the lives of many people worse by leaving them to fend for themselves. Most simply don't know what to do or where to turn.
The first step in their conversion to a new way of thinking about the lives of our people is to teach them that events such as death of a loved one, job loss and divorce will very likely happen to them at some point in their lives. When enough people know this, others will organize tools and training sessions by which everyone will eventually know how to cope with sudden unplanned changes in life.
If we're going to live longer, we will experience major life changes more often than our ancestors. It's time to grow up as societies and offer what our people need so that everyone knows how to cope with problems without turning to harmful alternatives such as drugs, addictions such as gambling, or abuse of loved ones.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a hands-on manual for parents and teachers to show what kids need, when they need it and why meeting those needs must not be an option as it is today.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Adapt To Change Or Suffer Disengagement
Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
- Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964)
Yet many people act as if it does. Or they deny what they know to be true, in the hope that a miracle will happen to change truth to what they want it to be.
Witness how many people fervently believe that the universe and eveything in it was created in six earth days, as is stated in Genesis of the Abrahamic bibles. Scientific evidence can prove beyond a doubt that the universe took billions of year to come to its present form and, indeed, is still changing. These people are troubled by the teaching of the results of scientific study because it contravenes what they believe.
The present administration in the USA believes it can end the war in Iraq and bring the country to a meaningful place at the table of international wisdom and concensus by killing off or imprisoning those who want the US military to leave their country. This despite the fact that President Bush has no idea how to bring his dream for Iraq into reality and considerable doubt exists as to whether the majority of people in Iraq want that goal anyway. In his quest, Mr. Bush spends billions of dollars each day of taxpayer money on his military, claiming that he is protecting his citizens from an enemy that wants nothing to do with the US (other than financial aid until it rebuilds what the US military destroyed).
Many people buy lots of lottery tickets each week or visit gambling casinos or events despite the fact that many more people have destroyed their lives and wrecked their families than have ever "won big." Many reasearch projects have shown that winning a huge amount of money is apt to permanently destroy the life of the winner and his or her loved ones because they have no idea how to manage the demands and responsibilities having that wealth entails.
Many people who suffered terribly when their first marriage failed blamed their spouses for weaknesses and faults, then went out to find second spouses with those same weaknesses and faults, only to have that marriage fail as well. They have trouble accepting that it is them that must change, not the people they choose to marry then try to change.
Truth and reality are not so mysterious for those who insist upon adapting themselves and their thinking to what is needed to accommodate the circumstances of their lives and the realities of what has been proven by others (and often by themselves).
People turn to some devastating and destructive devices and strategies for managing their activities in order to avoid facing up to evidence that disagrees with what they believe. In many cases they harm themselves and those they love because they will not change what they believe.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, trying to put the truth into perspective and self-deception into history.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964)
Yet many people act as if it does. Or they deny what they know to be true, in the hope that a miracle will happen to change truth to what they want it to be.
Witness how many people fervently believe that the universe and eveything in it was created in six earth days, as is stated in Genesis of the Abrahamic bibles. Scientific evidence can prove beyond a doubt that the universe took billions of year to come to its present form and, indeed, is still changing. These people are troubled by the teaching of the results of scientific study because it contravenes what they believe.
The present administration in the USA believes it can end the war in Iraq and bring the country to a meaningful place at the table of international wisdom and concensus by killing off or imprisoning those who want the US military to leave their country. This despite the fact that President Bush has no idea how to bring his dream for Iraq into reality and considerable doubt exists as to whether the majority of people in Iraq want that goal anyway. In his quest, Mr. Bush spends billions of dollars each day of taxpayer money on his military, claiming that he is protecting his citizens from an enemy that wants nothing to do with the US (other than financial aid until it rebuilds what the US military destroyed).
Many people buy lots of lottery tickets each week or visit gambling casinos or events despite the fact that many more people have destroyed their lives and wrecked their families than have ever "won big." Many reasearch projects have shown that winning a huge amount of money is apt to permanently destroy the life of the winner and his or her loved ones because they have no idea how to manage the demands and responsibilities having that wealth entails.
Many people who suffered terribly when their first marriage failed blamed their spouses for weaknesses and faults, then went out to find second spouses with those same weaknesses and faults, only to have that marriage fail as well. They have trouble accepting that it is them that must change, not the people they choose to marry then try to change.
Truth and reality are not so mysterious for those who insist upon adapting themselves and their thinking to what is needed to accommodate the circumstances of their lives and the realities of what has been proven by others (and often by themselves).
People turn to some devastating and destructive devices and strategies for managing their activities in order to avoid facing up to evidence that disagrees with what they believe. In many cases they harm themselves and those they love because they will not change what they believe.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, trying to put the truth into perspective and self-deception into history.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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