'We adults flatter ourselves when we think that we are the best models, guides, and teachers for children. Children are much more interested in other children than in us. Children are especially interested in, and ready to learn from, those others who are a little older than themselves, a little farther along in their development, but not too far along. Children are drawn to older children, and older children are drawn to adolescents. Adulthood is too far off to be of much concern. That is why age-mixing is crucial to children's self-education. #Younger children want to do what older children do: Children on the verge of being able to play strategy games, or read, or perform new operations on the computer, or engage in more advanced athletic activities, become motivated to do so by observing those activities in older children and adolescents. In our study of how and why children learn to read at the school, some told us that they wanted to read because they were envious of the older kids who were reading and talking about what they had read. As one student put it, "I wanted the same magic they had; I wanted to join that club." Younger children don't just blindly mimic older ones. Rather, they watch, think about what they see, and incorporate what they learn into their own behavior in ways that make sense to them. Because of this, even the mistakes and unhealthy behaviors of older children can provide positive lessons for younger ones. Young children talk endlessly about what they like and don't like about the activities of the older ones around them. Negative models can be as helpful as positive ones. -- #Older children are excellent helpers and advisors of younger children, partly because they do not help or advise too much: Children often prefer to ask an older child rather than an adult for help or advice, even when an adult is available whom they could easily ask. I suspect there are many reasons for this, but one of the main reasons, I think, has to do with control. Children seeking help or advice do not want to give up their own control of the situation. They don't want any more help than what they ask for, and they want to decide themselves whether or not to accept what is offered. So, here is a valuable lesson that we adults can learn from children about helping and advising children: Don't give more help, or more advice, than is asked for! Come to think of it, the same lesson applies to helping and advising adults. -- #Older children expand their own understanding through explanations to younger children: Everyone who has ever been a teacher knows that we learn more when we teach than when we are taught. The requirement to put ideas into words that others can understand, and the need to think through objections that others might make, leads us to think deeply about what we thought we knew. Often this leads us to a better understanding than we had before. In an age-mixed environment, children, not just adults, can learn through teaching. -- #Older children develop compassion and nurturing skills through helping younger ones: Even more valuable than the cognitive gains derived from interacting with younger children are the moral gains. To develop effectively as responsible, ethical beings, children need to have the experience of caring for others, not just the experience of being cared for by others. -- Sudbury Valley has about 200 students, who range in age from 4 on through high-school age (age 18 or so). It seems to work great for everyone in that age range, and I think such a broad mix is valuable for everyone. The 18-year-olds are sometimes almost like uncles or aunts to some of the 4-year-olds. They are, I think, learning to be parents. In our culture we provide very little opportunity for people to learn how to be parents, until they actually are.'

'Sometimes I'll just wait and say: "Why don't you just say whatever comes?" People have a great deal of difficulty doing that, but I'll ask: "Let's see what comes up today." Especially patients who I've been seeing for a while and don't know what to say, I will say with a certain kind of confidence: "You know, that's terrific in a way, because sometimes meetings you haven't rehearsed or planned for are much better, so let's just take time now and see what comes." It sounds like a little bit of Freud's notion of free association, but in a much more focused way. I'll generally guide them into wherever we go with this.'

'As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication – and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.' -- "...people can't get enough of each other, if, and only if, they can have each other at a distance in amounts they can control." -- "Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding – and we clean them up with technology." -- "We use conversation with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. And our flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for reflection." -- "...people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they become almost willing to dispense with people altogether." -- "Being alone feels like a problem to be solved, and so people try to solve it by 'connecting'." -- "...if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves – so we 'connect' more and more, but in the process we set ourselves up to be isolated." -- "Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious, in order to feel alive. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self."

'All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self. When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun “I,” a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we’re not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her.The brain changes with experience throughout our lives; it’s in loving relationships of all sorts — partners, children, close friends — that brain and body really thrive. During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you’re with someone you can trust, it needn’t waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing. Its doors of perception swing wide open.'

'We have recently proposed that physical pain – the pain experienced upon bodily injury – and social pain – the pain experienced upon social injury when social relationships are threatened, damaged or lost – share neural and computational mechanisms. This shared system is responsible for detecting cues that might be harmful to survival, such as physical danger or social separation, and then for recruiting attention and coping resources to minimize threat. Such an overlap would be evolutionarily adaptive. Because of the prolonged period of immaturity and the critical need for maternal care in mammalian infants, it has been suggested that the pain mechanisms involved in detecting and preventing physical danger were co-opted by the more recently evolved social attachment system to detect and prevent social separation. If the need to maintain close contact with the mother for nurturance and protection is crucial to mammalian survival, experiencing pain upon social separation would be an adaptive way to prevent the harmful consequences of maternal separation. -- When young children experience physical pain, they experience social pain more easily and more frequently in response to separation from their caregiver. Similarly, individuals with chronic pain disorders are more likely than healthy controls to have an anxious attachment style, characterized by a preoccupation with the commitment status of relationship partners and to have heightened fears of social evaluation and rejection... -- ...certain drugs have similar regulatory effects on both physical and social pain. Opiate-based drugs, known for their effectiveness in alleviating physical pain, lessen social pain in animals and humans. Additionally, anti-depressants, often prescribed for anxiety or depression resulting from social stressors, have recently been found to alleviate physical pain as well and are now prescribed regularly to treat chronic pain.'

'A male psychotherapist may be more effective for some patients than others; just as a female psychotherapist may have more success with certain patients than others. Part of this difference does have to do with gender and often unconscious gender psychology. Some male psychotherapists, for example, are fearful or out of touch with their "masculine" aggression, while others are estranged from their "feminine" side and feelings. Some female therapists either overidentify with the "masculine,"or devalue and dissociate it in their own personalities. This can all come into play during treatment, and commonly does so unconsciously in the form of what we call "countertransference" and other blindspots and biases on the psychotherapist's part. For example, when women stepped into the void left by men in the field of clinical psychology and other mental health professions, many adopted men's "masculine" perspective and rational orientation to treatment. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a good example of such a highly "masculinized" approach today, one which imputes primacy to rationality and thinking over affect, the unconscious, and the so-called "irrational" (i.e., "feminine") aspects of experience. The choice of this one-sidedly logical, mechanistic orientation to treatment represents an overvaluation of the "masculine" and devaluation of the "feminine" in psychotherapy itself. Paradoxically, given the vast popularity of CBT with today's female and few remaining male psychotherapists as opposed to more analytical, humanistic or existential approaches, it is clear that, unfortunately, the "feminization" of the psychotherapy field in terms of gender does not necessarily translate into a more truly "feminine" orientation to psychotherapy. Or, in some instances, it has led to an overly "feminine," soft, passive approach to treatment in which firm limits, boundaries, structure and confrontation of what I call the daimonic are lacking. -- ...the fact remains that men and women clinicians have very divergent perspectives, psychologies and life experiences, and each bring something different to the therapeutic table. Not better or worse, superior or inferior. Just different, but equally valuable. This is why it is wisely recommended, and in some clinical training programs required, that trainees undergo two courses of therapy or analysis – one with each sex. -- Because of our complementary polar differences, women will always need male psychotherapists, and men female psychotherapists. Despite of, or really, due to our gender differences, we still have much to learn from each other. But men will always need to be mentored and initiated into manhood mainly by men, not women. Now that there is a serious shortage of men remaining in or entering the psychotherapy profession, unlucky consumers have even fewer choices – not only regarding the type of treatment they receive, but which gender will provide it.'

'Males generally define themselves in terms of individual achievement and work and females more often in relational terms (Gilligan, 1987). In psychotherapy, therapists communicate values by their selection of material to question or to comment on, by the timing of their interpretations, and by their affective reaction to the content of what is said by the patient. Male and female therapists can view a patient’s life experiences differently, particularly if these experiences are gender specific (Shapiro, 1993). Many support the view that women should be treated by women in order to avoid being misunderstood or treated from a male-oriented perspective. This male perspective may oversimplify the effects of gender and minimize the necessary working through of ambivalence and conflict in the therapeutic relationship. Stereotypes and expectations about women affect male patients as well. A man may seek treatment from a woman in order to avoid a competitive or an authoritarian relationship with a man, to avoid homosexual feelings, or because he has had poor relationships with women in the past and wants to work these out with a woman. His expectations may be that a woman will provide the cure for his problems with intimacy. Many women feel that it is more difficult for a man to empathize with some issues that are gender specific; this may also be true for women who must empathize with male issues (Horner, 1992). Therapists often do not attend sufficiently to the transference issues that encourage or inhibit discussion of particular material. This insufficient attention may be based on a number of factors, including gender.'

'At its best, therapeutic love on the psychotherapist's part may be most closely compared to amor platonicus (platonic love), agape, philia or storge, the nurturing love parents feel for their offspring. But eros, which Plato spoke of as a "great daimon," is perennially potentiated in both parties. How to provide such therapeutic love without overstepping the physical or romantic boundaries is part of the art of psychotherapy. How psychotherapists deal with the unexpected and unbidden appearance of eros, in themselves or their patients, in the transference or counter-transference, can make or break the treatment outcome. So what do psychotherapy patients really need? Is love enough? No. But there is little doubt as to the potent healing power of love, both in treatment and in life. American psychologist Carl Rogers, drawing on the discoveries of psychoanalysis, identified in his "person-centered" approach the importance of what he called "unconditional positive regard" and "reflective listening" in the therapy process, both of which are loving ways of relating empathetically to another human being. And Dr. Rogers, naively in my view, believed that if this loving approach could consistently be provided to the patient or "client" as he preferred to call them, it was all that's really needed for successful therapy. Perhaps for some. But, at least in my experience, patients need more from their psychotherapist than love in this sense. They also need structure, limits, firmness, guidance, encouragement, confrontation, honesty, integrity and resolute commitment on the psychotherapist's part to accompany them on their personal journey through hell (and the unconscious) and back. ...it is only love – the right love at the right time – that can cure or heal [a] festering "love wound." No amount of technical tricks, to paraphrase the mature Jung, cognitive restructuring or pharmacotherapy will do. Love in psychotherapy, as in any healthy, mature relationship, is a two-way street: Love flows from the psychotherapist and back from the patient. So it is not just the love provided by the therapist that matters, but the love returned by the patient that is ultimately the healing factor in treatment.'

'Psychotherapy, in my view, is more soundly focused on what C.G. Jung termed individuation: the unpredictable, lengthy, labyrinthine process of becoming more whole. Psychotherapy is about finding and fulfilling our destiny: While for most this may include romantic love, marriage, parenthood, career, etc., there are others for whom fate or destiny has something quite different in store. Psychotherapy is about creativity: courageously claiming the personal freedom to express ourselves constructively in the world to our fullest potential. Finally, psychotherapy is fundamentally about acceptance: learning to accept ourselves and others, our fate, our responsibility, our existential aloneness, the unconscious, evil, the daimonic, and life on its own terms. Surely, this is a sort of love. Love of reality. Love of the world as it is. Love of all humanity. Love even of the dark and tragic, seemingly sometimes senseless side of life. And this is, for want of a better term, a spiritual love. Psychotherapy is, for these reasons, an essentially spiritual process. But it is precisely this reawakening, rekindling or stirring of spiritual love, this gradual opening up, this growing willingness to tolerate ambiguity and loneliness, this deepening receptivity to life, oneself and others during the psychotherapy process that can ready us for interpersonal love and intimacy, and which – when lacking, undeveloped or resisted - resides at the root of most mental disorders. And what exactly is the mysterious, potent, transformative power that serves to awaken this newfound or renewed capacity to love in the psychotherapy patient? Freud, Jung and others since observed that the alchemical catalyst occurs in the dynamic and uniquely intimate relationship between patient and therapist, and very much resembles--yes, you guessed it – love.'

'What is the psychospiritual significance of the mythical labyrinth? The labyrinth can be seen as an archetypal symbol of the psyche and of what C.G. Jung called the individuation process: that twisty, unpredictable, tortuous, serpentine path toward wholeness and authenticity. The goal is to reach the center, the Self, the core of our being. But this is only half the journey. For having discovered the inner center with it's treasure, the "pearl of great price," is not sufficient: One must then find a way out of the labyrinth and back to the outer world – forever transformed by this experience. And this inward and outward expedition is repeated over and over, each time yielding new riches. Psychotherapy itself can be such a labyrinthine process. Patients often seek psychotherapy because they feel alone and hopeless, confused and abandoned, much like the unlucky lost souls caught in the mythic labyrinth. Indeed, as for those suffering victims, suicide sometimes seems the only way out of the labyrinth. The impenetrable darkness, disorientation, discouragement and deep dread of the unknown may be intolerable at times. What is it about the inescapable labyrinth that makes it so tragically intolerable? Perhaps it is precisely the immense nothingness and darkness of the labyrinth that we humans find most frightening: Such places echo or reflect back to us that which dwells in the deepest, darkest recesses of our own psyche. Whatever it is we fear most – and therefore flee from – is called forth and amplified by the lightless labyrinth. The psychotherapy patient too is heroic, sacrificing his or her narcissistic arrogance by seeking help, facing fear of the unknown, willingly walking into the labyrinth and confronting his or her own personal Minotaur. When the psychotherapist invites and encourages the patient to explore the labyrinth – the unknown, the unconscious, the shadow, the daimonic – we bestow the gifts of Ariadne: the empowering sword of strength, courage, and rational, logical, analytical insight, and the means to remain tangibly tethered, rooted, related and connected to us, to reality, to the light, to humanity, to the outer, material world – and to one's self. These are essential tools for the task. Venturing into the labyrinth improperly equipped and prepared is a perilous and foolhardy undertaking for both therapist and patient, courting catastrophe. In psychotherapy, the Ariadnean thread symbolizes both the therapeutic relationship – the strong, supportive, vital, empathetic tie between patient and therapist – as well as the struggling and disoriented hero-patient's still undiscovered destiny.'

'When is therapy over? Who decides? And on what basis? What happens when psychotherapy goes on either too briefly or too long? In most cases, today's psychotherapy tends to be too brief, too superficial, and does far too little to psychologically prepare the patient for life after therapy. When the patient requires a more "open-ended" therapy, the question becomes one of duration: How long is long? Therapy addiction is not necessarily the patient or client's fault, but rather the responsibility of the psychotherapist. Psychotherapy, like everything else in life, has limitations. Paradoxically, recognizing and accepting this existential fact of limitation can intensify and deepen the patient's growth and development in therapy. For it is during the "termination phase" of therapy that some of the most important working through is accomplished. This termination phase is the final stage of psychotherapy. But many patients – and therapists – avoid it for as long as possible and thus are never forced to confront it. Termination is a sort of death or loss of a deeply valued, supportive, nurturing and intimate human relationship. But so long as patients remain in this somewhat womb-like, often parent-to-child protective bubble, they, at least at some level, are refusing to grow up and venture out alone into the difficult, cold, cruel world. And by permitting the patient to avoid the anxiety, trepidation and sadness of termination, therapists perpetuate a dependency on therapy every bit as addictive as any drug. The question sooner or later arises: Have I attained my goals for therapy? Can I continue to feel good and remain confident without therapy? What if I stop and begin to backslide? Am I strong enough to handle whatever challenges life brings? These are some of the most crucial questions posed in psychotherapy. And the answers can only be found by accepting and anticipating the inevitability of termination and working through whatever anxieties, abandonment issues, sadness and other feelings this evokes during what is sometimes a prolonged, painful, tumultuous but ultimately liberating and empowering termination process.'

'The narcissist ultimately starves for love because he or she can never get enough in the present to compensate for the past. -- Pathological narcissism is related to narcissistic rage: a furious, reflexive, unrelenting need to repay any perceived slight or insult. Neurotic narcissism starts out as normal narcissism, a healthy, natural childhood need for attention and appreciation which, when continually frustrated, becomes fixated and pathological. Neurotic narcissism stems from inadequate, insufficient or traumatic parenting and resulting narcissistic injury, especially prior to five years of age, during what Freud called the pre-Oedipal period. Children at this tender age find any serious lack of attunement and attention – or certainly, any outright abuse, neglect or emotional, if not physical, abandonment – an insult, a psychological injury, a traumatic psychic wound which distorts perceptions of both themselves, the world, and their relationship to it. When children experience parents or caretakers as unloving, rejecting or hostile, they respond to this narcissistic wounding by creating a shell-like false self – which replaces, protects and conceals the unaccepted, unloved and damaged true self – presenting instead a persona (Jung) based on what they perceive the parents and world want them to be. A great deal of what pathological narcissism in adults disguises is unresolved infantile anger, resentment and rage about not being recognized, accepted, and loved for who we are. This anger – along with feelings of being unlovable and unworthy of love – is buried beneath the false self. It is repressed, but not forgotten, nor forgiven. Narcissistic rage from the past tends to be re-stimulated by intimate relationships in the present. In romantic relationships, feelings are inevitably re-injured, and the childhood anger suddenly resurfaces – with a vengeance.'

#Contact: Perceptual Contact; Interactional Contact; Initial Assessment #Involvement: Mutuality; Testing #Intimacy: Personal Commitment; Interpersonal Commitment; Social Bonding; Anxiety: Security Anxiety, Fulfillment Anxiety, Excitement Anxiety #Deterioration: Relational Damage; Weakening Bonds #Repair: Intrapersonal Repair; Interpersonal Repair #Dissolution: Intrapersonal Separation; Interpersonal Separation; Social Separation

'Disillusionment becomes an engine for growth because it forces us to discover our needs. Knowing oneself, recognizing one's needs, and speaking up for them in a relationship are often acts of bravery, says Page. Most of us are guarded about our needs, because they are typically our areas of greatest sensitivity and vulnerability. "You have to discover—and be able to share—what touches you and moves you the most," he observes. "But first, of course, you have to accept that in yourself. ...taking the risk to expose your inner life to your partner turns out to be the great opportunity for expanding intimacy and a sense of connection. This is the great power of relationships: Creating intimacy is the crucible for growing into a fully autonomous human being while the process of becoming a fully realized person expands the possibility for intimacy and connection. This is also the work that transforms a partner into the right partner. Relationships need to continually evolve to fit ever-changing circumstances. They need to incorporate each partner's changes and find ways to meet their new needs.'

'In the TED* framework, the Victim shifts into the role of Creator. The Persecutor takes on the role of Challenger, and the Rescuer assumes the new role of Coach. A Creator is someone who stops to think about what they want - what their long-term goal or vision is. Creators are outcome-oriented as opposed to problem-oriented. Problems will always occur, but instead of acting as a Persecutor, the problem now takes on the form of Challenger. A Challenger is a person or situation that forces you to clarify your goal. Instead of Rescuing someone, a Coach asks questions that are intended to help the individual to make informed choices.The key differentiation between a Rescuer and a Coach is that the Coach sees the individual as capable of making choices and of solving their own problems. A Coach asks questions that enable the individual to see the possibilities for positive action, to focus on what they do want instead of what they don't want. Coaches see victims as Creators in their own right and meet them as equals. This process interrupts the drama cycle and puts the former victim in the powerful position of Creator where they make informed choices and focus on outcomes instead of problems.'

Paraphrased -- Rescuers don't see themselves as Victims; they see themselves as the one with the answer. A Rescuer needs a Victim, they need a project. They need someone they can fix so that they can feel better. The Rescuer-in-Victim is the Martyr: "After all I've done for you. I've sacrificed my life for you. I've given you this and that and sacrificed all my needs – and this is the appreciation I get." And then they get a little resentful, and they move up to Persecutor, and the way a Rescuer persecutes is: "That's it, I'm not saving you anymore. I'm kicking you out of my life." But then, there's always something that hooks them back into Rescue, and it's usually one of two things: It's either pity or guilt. Rescuers do not see themselves as Victims, and they hate to think of themselves as Persecutors.

'#Stage 1: Lust: Testosterone and Oestrogen #Stage 2: Attraction: Adrenaline, Cortisol, Dopamine, and Serotonin #Stage 3: Attachment: Oxytocin and Vasopressin -- And finally … how to fall in love: Find a complete stranger. Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour. Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.'

'Early relationships alter our brains before we learn to speak. As you learn together with your earliest caregivers how to regulate your emotions, your brain will be making lots of new pathways that are necessary for you to learn to become comfortable with your emotions and manage them for yourself. Your earliest bonds also serve as a model for all subsequent relationships, teaching you to form nourishing, enriching, and mutually beneficial relationships throughout your life. The bulk of these neural connections happen before you are two years old. In other words, much of the wiring up that determines how you respond emotionally and conduct relationships, happened pre-verbally. The logic, reason and language part of your brain develops so slowly that most of the patterns for how you feel are formed before you can reason with yourself and others.'

"Essentially what the relationship is an interactive mechanism for generating very high levels of positive affect. And the positive affect is ... enjoyment/joy and interest/excitement."

"Differentiated parts become linked together." - "Health is defined by integration."

'...our capacity for self-regulation depends so much upon our interactions with other people that it might well be called "other-regulated self-regulation." We're not born knowing how to regulate ourselves – in fact, we're alarmingly, chaotically, un-self-regulated creatures at birth, more so than most other newborn animals on earth. Loving parents, if we're lucky, begin the long process of teaching us how to organize and regulate our inner selves - encoding their care and attention in the pliable neural fibers that integrate various regions throughout our brains. No matter how good we had it in the beginning, however, we'll need reinforcement of these early lessons throughout life, and much remedial work if we were shortchanged early on. For Siegel, therapists are the remedial attachment experts and rescuers of the chronically un-self-regulated, and it is their job to, in effect, help rewire the frayed neural connections, reintegrate (or sometimes integrate for the first time) different areas and functions of the brain – implicit and explicit memory, right and left hemisphere, neocortex with limbic system and brain stem.'

'After decades of cognitive and behavioral scientists purposely seeking "to put emotions out of sight and out of mind," says neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, they're being forced to "relearn that ancient emotional systems have a power that is quite independent of neocortical processes." What really has changed isn't so much the aim of therapy, which has always been, whatever its putative goal, changing, shaping, soothing, controlling, redirecting, harnessing the emotions, even freeing some of them up for more robust expression—that's what "affect regulation" is all about. What's changing is the game of therapy—how it's done. For the first time, mainstream therapists are trying, as it were, to fight fire with fire—to get at that vast, subterranean sea of affect as much or more through nonverbal resonance as through words. Through facial expression, eye contact, tone of voice, tempo, breathing, the therapist creates a kind of wordless but dense and charged felt presence, which permeates the being of both therapist and client.'

"The brain is the social organ of the body." - "The mind is in your body and in your relationships." - "Our minds are created by our relationships." - "The body is the physical mechanism by which energy and information flows. Relationships are the sharing of energy and information flows. And the mind is the emergent, self-organizing process arising from both our bodies and our relationships." - "Thoughts have a quality of absolute certainty. When you give people the power to do what the mind really does, which is shift degrees of probability of energy flow, and bring them down to this open space which we call awareness, you actually strengthen the capacity of the mind to not only see things clearly, but literally to integrate experience... this is the way you stay fully present to another person and also to yourself."

'This interactive talk will examine two major questions: What is the mind? and How can we create a healthy mind? We'll examine the interactions among the mind, the brain, and human relationships and explore ways to create a healthy mind, an integrated brain, and mindful, empathic relationships. In this talk, well offer a working definition of the mind and practical implications for how to perceive and strengthen the mind itself—a learnable skill called mindsight.'

'The game-break is to 1:1 interpersonal relationships what the “Aha!” moment is to individual introspection. The rare moment, shortly after meeting for the first time, when two people experience a sudden, uncontracted moment of connection, shared meaning and resonance. I call it a game-break, because you momentarily stop playing social games and realize with a shock that there is some part of an actual person on the other side that perfectly matches a part of you that you thought was unique. A moment that elevates human contact from the level of colliding billiard balls to the level of electricity or chemistry. It is the moment when a relationship can be born. The game break is so rare because we are at once desperate for, and terrified of, genuine connection. We know exactly when to break eye-contact to prevent polite from turning into unwanted intimacy. We know exactly the appropriate kind of smile for every situation. Our sense of our own, and others’ personal space is finely-tuned, and we know what level of closeness requires apology, and what levels require snubs, sharpness or displays of anger. ...in every situation, even the most random, there are always tiny leftover gaps in our defenses, and we are grateful to have them. Through these gaps and imperfections, sometimes the game-break can sneak through. ...the uncontracted quality of the game-break does not last for long. A social contract descends, to structure and codify any continuation of the relationship. Which explains why some of our most precious social memories are of brief, accidental encounters with strangers, often nameless. The tragedy of Wiio’s law is this. Our most connected moments are with people we know we will never meet again.' -- Monkey see 'parent'...

'..the Persecutor and Rescuer are on the upper end of the triangle. These roles assume a “one-up” position over others, meaning they relate as though they are better, stronger, smarter, or more-together than the victim. Sooner or later the victim, who is in the one-down position at the bottom of the triangle, develops a metaphorical "crick in the neck" from always looking up. Feeling “looked down upon” or “worth- less than” the others, the Victim builds resentment and sooner or later, retaliation follows. A natural progression from victim to persecutor follows. This generally moves the persecutor or rescuer into victim. Reminiscent of a not-so-musical game of musical chairs, all players sooner or later rotate positions. Our starting-gate position on the victim triangle is not only where we most often enter the triangle, it is also the role through which we actually define ourselves. It becomes a strong part of our identity. Each starting-gate position has its own particular way of seeing and reacting to the world. We all have unconscious core beliefs acquired in childhood, derived from our interpretation of early family encounters. These become “life themes” that predispose us towards the unconscious selection of a particular starting gate position on the triangle.' -- http://youtu.be/tN3sD6Vr3PE

'...when people experience anxiety, they try to reduce their anxiety by seeking closeness with relationship partners. The third strategy is called the hyperactivation, or anxiety attachment, strategy. Something provokes anxiety in a person, who then tries to reduce anxiety by seeking physical or psychological closeness to a partner. The partner rebuffs the request for greater closeness. The lack of responsiveness increases feelings of insecurity and anxiety. The person then gets locked into a cycle with the partner: the person tries to get closer, the partner rejects the request for greater closesness, which leads the person to try even harder to get closer, followed by another rejection from the partner, and so on. The cycle ends only when the situation shifts to a security-based strategy (because the partner finally responds positively) or when the person switches to an attachment avoidant strategy (because the person gives up on getting a positive response from the partner).'

'Insecure attachment: Anxious–preoccupied attachment: People who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment tend to agree with the following statements: "I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don't value me as much as I value them." People with this style of attachment seek high levels of intimacy, approval, and responsiveness from their partners. They sometimes value intimacy to such an extent that they become overly dependent on their partners – a condition colloquially termed clinginess. Compared to securely attached people, people who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment tend to have less positive views about themselves. They often doubt their worth as a partner and blame themselves for their partners' lack of responsiveness.'

From the book: 'When Attachment Styles Clash: The Anxious-Avoidant Trap: Conflict is often left unresolved because the resolution itself creates too much intimacy. If you are anxious or secure, you genuinely want to work out a relationship problem. However, the resolution itself often brings a couple closer together – this is a scenario that, however unconsciously, the avoidant partner wants to avoid. While people with an anxious or secure attachment style seek to resolve a disagreement to achieve greater emotional closeness, this outcome is uncomfortable for the avoidant who actually seeks to remain distant. In order to dodge the possibility of getting closer, avoidants tend to grow more hostile and distant as arguments progress. Unless there is recognition of the process involved in an anxious-avoidant conflict, the distancing during conflict tends to repeat itself and causes a lot of unhappiness. Without addressing the issue, the situation can go from bad to worse.'

'Early experiences with caregivers gradually give rise to a system of thoughts, memories, beliefs, expectations, emotions, and behaviours about the self and others. This system, called the "internal working model of social relationships", continues to develop with time and experience. Internal models regulate, interpret and predict attachment-related behaviour in the self and the attachment figure. As they develop in line with environmental and developmental changes, they incorporate the capacity to reflect and communicate about past and future attachment relationships. They enable the child to handle new types of social interactions; knowing, for example, that an infant should be treated differently from an older child, or that interactions with teachers and parents share characteristics. This internal working model continues to develop through adulthood, helping cope with friendships, marriage and parenthood, all of which involve different behaviours and feelings.'

'#What should I stop doing? [Why?] #What should I keep doing? [Why?] #What should I start doing? [Why?]'

'The attempt to escape from feelings has its origins in a babyhood in which the baby's feelings have not been identified and responded to in a contingent way. You can only change emotional processing by doing it differently. When a particular feeling is aroused, neurotransmitters are released from the subcortex and old neural networks automatically become activated to manage this state of arousal in the old way. If your therapist accepts your feelings, they do not have to be denied by the neural network which would normally do that, or acted upon by the neural network that would normally respond in that way. The therapist's acceptance allows a mental space to reflect on the feelings and consider how to respond afresh. Whilst the feelings are alive and active, so too are the stress hormones which will assist new (higher brain) cortisol synapses to be made in response to the sub-cortical signals. Together with the therapist, new networks can be developed.'

'They didn't rush because the kid can't handle pain, but because they can't tolerate the kid's pain.' -- 'I know this is going to run me afoul of every comfy-chair therapist in America, but there is no reason to write anything down, ever. You're not a detective, you're not looking for inconsistencies or lost time, the patient is there for answers and the structure of your relationship is itself the answers. We can discuss good and bad technique later; the point here is to establish that these two people are creating "environments" that are safe for themselves. It may also be safe for the patient, it may be labeled as "for the patient" but I hope it is evident that the real impetus is the comfort of the therapist. With me so far? Ok: that's also how they parent.'

'...guanxi describes a personal connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service, or be prevailed upon. The two people need not be of equal social status. Someone is described as having good guanxi if their particular network of influence could assist in the resolution of the problem currently being spoken about. ...guanxi can describe a state of general understanding between two people: "he/she is aware of my wants/needs and will take them into account when deciding her/his course of future actions which concern or could concern me without any specific discussion or request". It is custom for Chinese people to cultivate an intricate web of guanxi relationships, which may expand in a huge number of directions, and includes lifelong relationships. Reciprocal favors are the key factor to maintaining one’s guanxi web, failure to reciprocate is considered an unforgivable offense. The more you ask of someone the more you owe them.'

'Guanxi operates as essentially a private favor exchange. If I can organize a chain of value exchange among my web threads that results in getting something that I want, then I can execute a Guanxi transaction (or chain transaction). The system is lubricated by the concept of a Guanxi Debt. I can utilize the system for short-term needs certainly, and that is a very common aspect of the system. But I can also incur or accrue Guanxi that (if managed wisely) can be utilized for larger purposes at a later time. Naturally, such favors often have financial components. Even the outright sale of Guanxi is common. ...Guanxi is like your brain, or your muscles. It must be used in order to grow strong or stay sharp. Since everybody is operating within the same system, if I develop some particularly important Guanxi thread, but then don’t use it, I will lose it. This is because the Guanxi thread is established by mutual agreement. The opposite party has also made his or her calculations...'

'Gestalt therapy is built upon two central ideas: that the most helpful focus of psychotherapy is the experiential present moment, and that everyone is caught in webs of relationships; thus, it is only possible to know ourselves against the background of our relationship to the other.'

'Extroverts are not willing to have 1:1 encounters with anyone unless they’ve been properly introduced into their social fields. Extroverts tend to enjoy spending a lot of time with people they know well. Talking to strangers is less rewarding to them because most E-E transactions are maintenance transactions that help maintain, spend or appreciate the invested capital in the relationships. It is E-I interactions that create interesting tensions. Extroverts accuse introverts of selfishness: from their point of view, the introverts are taking out loans against jointly-held wealth, to invest unilaterally in risky ventures. Introverts in turn accuse extroverts of being overly possessive and stifling, since they cannot draw on the energy of the relationship without the other party being present. The confusion is simple if you note that the introvert is thinking in terms of two individually held bank accounts, while the extrovert is thinking in terms of a single jointly held one.'

'Some thoughts on philosophical parenting...'

'Choice is quality.'

"When it comes to getting resources when you're old, there are three basic strategies: #1. Save. #2. Invest in your relationships so that when you need resources, people will care for you. #3. Con people as if you're a victim, completely glossing over the fact that you're not a victim, that you did drive away people from your life. ...the more people give you money and resources because of this con, the less valuable (from a purely pragmatic standpoint) it is for you to invest in your relationships. This is a fundamental way in which statism has truly and catastrophically weakened the family and other kinds of social safety nets. If you can get old age pensions then you kind of don't need to have a great relationship with your adult children. Resource consumption in old age is the result of the virtuous investment in prior relationships. People who exploit and abuse others and who end up with no resources when they get older are gamblers, they are responsible for their own misfortune."

Gisted/Quoted -- The degree to which you need to invent scare stories to keep yourself in an existing relationship, is exactly the degree to which you really hate that relationship. Everybody who is not enlightened will always try to put you in a master/slave relationship. Slaves attempt to master each other by mimicking the state in every interaction. That's how deep it goes. The state replicates all the way down the chain because it comes from all the way up the chain from the origins of the family. Everything slaves do is to try establish dominance – yours or theirs, depending on their trauma. But philosophy is not the language of dominance, it is the language of humility, the language of truth derived from nature which is non-dominant, non-personal and universal. That's why if you speak the truth people will get so frustrated, so angry, confused, frightened – and lash out at you – because philosophy is shattering their paradigm of hierarchy right there in the moment.

On self-esteem and social levelling: "One of the problems with self-esteem is mistaking the accidental for the personally virtuous. You don't want to place your self-esteem on the accidental characteristics that you may have."

'"My little pumpkin would practically be helpless without me," said Hyams, 28, whose role in the adult relationship has slowly transformed from romantic lover to maternal caregiver over time. "I have to supervise almost everything he does, from making sure he gets up in the morning, to reminding him about his doctors' appointments. I even have to pick out his clothes for him when we go shopping together." Added Hyams, "I don't know how Pete would survive if I weren't around."'

"The shape of political authority in society mirrors that of the family. When you have better families you end up with better governments. When you have non-authoritarian, pacificist parenting with respect for the self-ownership of children, you will inevitably end up with a free society. If you want to change society, you have to change people's early childhood experiences. Objective morality, property rights and self-ownership all fall counter to just about everybody's experience of their family and certainly against their experience of church and school. So we're fighting a real uphill battle, it's one that we'll win, but it's going to take a long time."

'The greatest danger for slave-owners is that they will lose control of the moral definitions of “slavery” and “freedom.” The worst and most terrifying aspect of slavery is that you have to pretend that you are not a slave. If you are a slave, and you want to become free, the solution is simply this: Stop acting like a slave! Slaves are not allowed to tell the truth. So – you start off by telling the truth. This is the core of the Real-Time Relationship (RTR). The Real-Time Relationship is about empiricism and curiosity – fundamentally, it is the scientific method applied to our relationships. If our emotions tell us that we will be attacked for telling the truth – and we have not been telling the truth – it is because we wish to avoid confirmation – i.e. certainty. If we wish to “avoid” certainty, it is because we are already certain. Thus it is not really “certainty” that we wish to avoid, but the results of accepting what we already know to be true.'

'#Moving With: Strategies in which psychologically healthy people develop relationships: communication, agreement, disagreement, compromise, and decisions. #Moving Toward: The individual moves towards those perceived as a threat to avoid retribution and getting hurt. The argument is, “If I give in, I won’t get hurt.” This means that: if I give everyone I see as a potential threat whatever they want, I won’t be injured (physically or emotionally). #Moving Against: The individual threatens those perceived as a threat to avoid getting hurt. #Moving Away: The individual distances themselves from anyone perceived as a threat to avoid getting hurt. The argument is, “If I do not let anyone close to me, I won’t get hurt.” A neurotic desires to be distant because of being abused. If they can be the extreme introvert, no one will ever develop a relationship with them. If there is no one around, nobody can hurt them. They emotionally remove themselves from society.'

'"The playdating scene can be shallow, and you meet a lot of kids who won't think twice before lying to your face, but there's got to be that special someone out there somewhere," Gallagher said. "Look, I'm not going to say that it's not hard, because it is. But what am I supposed to do? Sit in the corner and cry all day?" Added Gallagher, "Trust me, I've done that already." Saying that all that he wants is someone to practice handstands with, or someone who has the same favorite color in common, the 5-year-old told reporters that he was just going to take things one step at a time.'

'What boredom proves in personal relationships...'

Gisted -- So to protect yourself from an escalation of violence, you reject yourself by saying: I am irritating and my parents have legitimate and rational moral complaints against me because I am a bad and they are good. And what does this mean: 'Good People Reject Me Because I Am Bad.' But the reality is completely the opposite: 'Bad People Reject Me Because I Am Good.' That is the survival strategy that parents inflict upon us: you have to lie to yourself and invert what is actually happening to survive. And what happens in later life if you don't deal with this problem? The pain avoidance that made you invert the irritability of your parents and your virtue continues. And so if you meet someone who rejects you, you believe they are 'good' and so you bond with them. Or if you meet someone who doesn't reject you, you reject them for being 'irritating' so that you can be 'good'. In this way all positive relationships are thwarted.

Gisted -- If you're 'irritating' to someone and you're utterly dependent on them, then either you say #1: They're wrong for being irritable and I'm going to be assertive to get my needs met, or #2: I'm an irritating person. My needs are unjust and I have to tread carefully because this person is justly upset with me. This is the basic calculation children go through. You don't confront an irrational person with the irrationality of their aggression because their aggression will just escalate. This is what slaves and prisoners and children have known since the beginning of time. So everyone takes what's behind door number 2: My caregiver is not irritable, I am irritating. This is self-rejection. When you are rejected by your parents, you don't question their ethics, you just reject yourself. It's inevitable and everyone does it. There's no shame in it. It's the most rational survival strategy when you're utterly dependent on someone for all your needs.

'...create a sick system. A sick system has four basic rules: #Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think. Thinking is dangerous. If people can stop and think about their situation logically, they might realize how crazy things are. #Rule 2: Keep them tired. Exhaustion is the perfect defense against any good thinking that might slip through. #Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved. Enmesh your success with theirs. Keep everything on the edge. Make sure there's never quite enough money, or time, or goods, or status, or anything else people might want. Insufficiency makes sick systems self-perpetuating, because if there's never enough x to fix the system, and never enough time to think of a better solution, everyone has to work just to keep the system from collapsing. #Rule 4: Reward intermittently. -- Once you're out of the system, it makes no sense at all. None of the carrots they dangled before you mean anything, and you start to truly comprehend just how much stress you were under.'

Socialism. The denial of all evidence-based thinking. The denial of scientific method applied generally and to relationships. The denial of ethics. The denial that one day you'll discover that your 'friend' is no longer suitable and that you need to move on to find new friends and rely on your self-esteem to test your own hypothesis as to what makes a good friend and what does not. But no, instead, this: 'For many child-rearing experts [government-funded?], the ideal situation might well be that of Matthew and Margaret Guest, 12-year-old twins in suburban Atlanta, who almost always socialize in a pack. “I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, [friendship coach]. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child’s ability to explore other options in the world.”' -- No, it gives them the very *reason*, the rationale, the self-directed responsibility to explore other options on *their* terms. Leave them kids alone!

"You *have* to demonstrate freedom before you can inspire freedom in others. You need to *feel* the same fear that other people feel when you talk about freedom. When you say, we need a radical re-evaluation of our ethics and human relationships: from coercion to voluntaryism, from dictatorship to property rights, from collectivism to individualism, from war to peace, from violence to words, from governments to DROs – people feel as freaked out about that as you would about deciding not to see anyone you feel obligated to ever again. It's terrifying. If you talk to people about getting rid of bad relationships in your life, they're going to feel unease and they're going to need to immediately create a defense and label it: he's an extremist and I'm nice – so they can manage their own feelings through disassociating from you and making you wrong in their own mind. And when you talk about the evil of the State it's even worse for people because what they hear is, your parents are evil."

'Girlfriends say: I pretend to believe you when you say you know kung fu, because I love you. The boyfriend says, not hearing anything she said: I'll stay with you until either I know kung fu; or you realize I don't really know kung fu, and my shame makes me hate you. -- Trinity loves Neo, even before he becomes The One. She's waited her whole life for him. He doesn't (yet) know kung fu, but she knows he will. And she does know kung fu -- and chooses him, saves him. That's love. But Neo doesn't return the love until he becomes who he has always known he is. He has to know kung fu first. Only then could someone really love him. -- The Matrix was the articulated solution to a growing existential crisis. It gave us hope: "Unless there's solid reason not to, I'm just going to allow the possibility that there's more to reality than what I see, and so there may be a valid reason to hope that my real life will kick in any time. And then someone will love me."

'The question for today is, why does it seem that women have higher sex drives than men? This is not a complaint I recall hearing in the 1970s or 80s. Start with: there's something eerily adolescent about men today. The movies say: until you do something extraordinary, or "save" the girl, then the love you feel isn't true love. Women may be the ones looking to feel "explosions" inside telling them they're in true love, but men externalize those explosions into real explosions before they know it's love. The male libido falls not because he's not interested in the woman he's with, but because he's not interested in the movie he's in. -- One of the only 80s action movies that didn't have a damsel in distress was First Blood, in which Rambo came back to the world only to find that not only did no one reward his identity, they hated him for it. But even that was a sort of confirmation. You don't need a girl when enough people hate you for who you are.'

'Bestselling author Craig Wheedon stops by Today NOW! to urge ladies to face the truth and dump the shapeshifter.'

'So you want to be Don Draper? You are. No, that's not a motivational speaker's empowerment mantra, it's a sad, unfortunate truth. Or a warning, if you choose to listen. -- Don Draper is that worst of all possible men. He is a serial monogamist incapable of committing to the playful lightness of physical intimacy... These men stay with the girl—sometimes for years, without cheating—but their inner eye is always on something else. No matter how desperately they think they love, they also know, simultaneously and without contradiction, that they're not really in love, and that this, too, will pass. They are immortal; there is always a future, because... because this can't be it. But they fear the future, so instead of pursuing it, they wait for it, along with the girl they've handcuffed with inertia. Now maybe you understand: when a guy with moussed hair and a seashell necklace starts staring at the girl's chest and rubbing his own, it must feel to her like some kind of immense relief.'

'Harry, a diffident 32-year-old charity campaigner, tells me, “The first girl I fell in love with couldn’t keep anything off her profile. It gave me a weird sense of out-of-body experience. Maybe I would have been self-conscious anyway, but I found myself thinking not, ‘What do I want to say to her?’ but ‘How will this play on her page?’ I wasn’t just after her approval, but that of an entire community. -- What we are talking about here is nothing less than a new means of symbolising relationship, and new methods of constructing a romantic identity: the virtual affair, the untagged husband, the status-update-parcelled-out self. As Lucy observes, “I still find myself ‘self-tweeting’. Every little thing that happens has the potential to go public, and it is a game to find a concise, witty way to make it viral." -- "...you realise it’s all just so many pixels on a screen.” Pixels with more permanence than some of the relationships they depict.'

'Dopamine. It's at the core of our sexual drives and survival needs, and it motivates us to do just about everything.' -- The imbalance between dopamine and prolactin 'contributes to the behaviors and mood swings that separate intimate partners emotionally. -- Virtually no one identifies this hidden, biological source of distress. Instead, the part of your brain that analyzes looks for other explanations. You know, for example, that you don't feel right. Your partner is acting weird. You're upset, and your honeymoon has ended. Maybe you write your uneasiness off as a mood swing, or get a prescription for an antidepressant. Or maybe you feel that your partner is somehow to blame for the fact that you feel rotten. "If only he would help more around the house." "If only she would stop badgering me." And so on. Yet, when you try to fix each other, you're addressing symptoms and ignoring the deeper problem—these neurochemical shifts.'

'Although no one knows why the pill affects attraction, some scientists believe that pregnancy—or in this case, the hormonal changes that mimic pregnancy—draws women toward nurturing relatives. -- Women who start or stop taking the pill, then, may be in for some relationship problems. A study published last year in Psychological Science found that women paired with MHC-similar men are less sexually satisfied and more likely to cheat on their partners than women paired with MHC-dissimilar men. So a woman on the pill, for example, might be more likely to start dating a MHC-similar man, but he could ultimately leave her less sexually satisfied. Then if she goes off the pill during the relationship, the accompanying hormonal changes will draw her even more strongly toward more MHC-dissimilar men. These immune genes may have a “powerful effect in terms of how well relationships are cemented,” says University of Liverpool psychologist Craig Roberts.' -- Cir-cum-invention

'...items are just manifestations of the connections I have with other people. Books educate me and give me thoughts to share with others. I love talking about books with my wife, and that shared experience of a book we’ve both read and loved is sublime. Here’s the real truth: as I’ve stopped buying so much stuff and started thinking carefully about the purchases that actually matter to me, they wind up being ones that are inherently tied to personal meaning and personal relationships. Stuff for the sake of having stuff doesn’t really have any meaning in the end – the stuff that has meaning is the stuff that you can share with others, or that profoundly changes you (and thus your relationships with others). This is why sometimes it’s hard to let go of stuff. You’re not really that concerned about the item itself, but you’re losing the connection to someone else or some part of you that the item represents.' -- Also shared ideas, opinions and affirmations as social/theory objects

'Objectum sexuals experience intense emotional connections with everyday things – bridges, stereos, the Eiffel Tower. Some even get 'married.' It's not a fetish, they say, but a sexual orientation. -- Objectum sexuals are animists, who believe everything in the world has a spirit and a soul, Ms. Eiffel explains. “The misconceptions are that OS people are social introverts, that they can't connect with people, therefore they choose objects instead,” Ms. Eiffel says. “Most OS people go to work, some are even married with kids.” “On the [one] side of the scale, we have people who just simply use sex toys for fun, but there's no emotional connection,” she says. “I like to say intimacy, not sex, because being physically close to my partners satisfies that,” he says. “Just like you would get pleasure from seeing and smelling and touching and tasting the person that you're with, they would get pleasure in the same way.”' -- And you know sneaker freaks and vinyl headz do this. (Ahem!)

'... on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. -- ...interacting with people and sharing experiences with them doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing lots of things about them. The main hurdle is the way we talk to those we’re close to: our conversations are usually meant not so much to gather information as to establish rapport and to bond - in short, to make friends. And we do that by focusing on areas of agreement and avoiding topics that might cause friction. Our natural tendency toward comradeship makes us, ironically, leery of learning too much about the people we’re befriending. -- People naturally seek out those they see as most like them, and a falsely inflated sense of similarity may only further cement friendships. ...couples that maintained positive illusions about each other tended to be happier than those that didn’t.'

'Parasocial relationships are the kind of one sided pseudo-relationships we develop over time with people or characters we might see on TV or in the movies. So, just as a friendship evolves through spending time together and sharing personal thoughts and opinions, parasocial relationships evolve by watching characters on our favorite TV shows, and becoming involved with their personal lives, idiosyncrasies, and experiences as if they were those of a friend. -- Social surrogates are the safest of social connections insofar as they can provide the psychological experience of a connection with none of the painful slights, time consuming maintenance, or personal sacrifice of a real relationship. -- [When faced with the] potential loss of their favorite television characters ...viewers anticipated experiencing the same negative reactions to parasocial breakups as they experience when their real social relationships dissolve.'

'We assume we know the people whose petty complaints and daily routines we’ve heard so much about because, traditionally, the only way to hear such things was to get to know them well. But it’s impossible to really know someone through sanitized soundbites. In 140 chars, there’s little room for the nuances of personality such conversation typically reveals. ...all see the carefully-prepared facade people want to present, and come away thinking that we know them better than we really do. With people we know in “real life,” this isn’t such a big deal. We already know their personality; Twitter simply helps maintain our relationship by keeping us up-to-date. And while, in doing so, it lets us maintain vastly more relationships ...on Twitter, at the same time you sign up to hear from Oprah, you can also follow—and cement your relationship with—more real friends. And it’s a good thing too, because with all these fake friends running around, we’re going to need all the real ones we can get.'

'... a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: “I don’t buy it.” You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it. My husband hadn’t yet come to this understanding with himself. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had supported our family of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn’t been going so well, and his ability to be the breadwinner was in rapid decline. He’d been miserable about this, felt useless, was losing himself emotionally and letting himself go physically. And now he wanted out of our marriage; to be done with our family. But I wasn’t buying it.'

'Perhaps the idea is that a relationship with a product is always already compromised, so one can’t be disappointed or disappointing. These people are not resisting the effects of romantic capitalism; they are embracing them more completely. Romantic love deeply ingrained competitive individualism and became the alibi for authorizing a certain righteous hedonism (expressed in the market through purchases) in the name of discovering who we really are. The 2-D lovers represent the completion of that arc; they have dispensed with the alibi and have moved directly to an open and virtually unashamed love for products instead of people. A 2-D lover named Momo, the most disturbing of those mentioned in the article, puts it pretty succinctly: “I don’t care if people understand or not,” Momo said. “I just want them to leave me alone. I don’t have any nostalgia for reality. I’m happy living in the 2-D world.”'

“As soon as I saw his iPhone on the table, I felt resentful,” she says. '“He’s on Twitter, for work he says.” They’d barely got beyond their aperitif when a row started. “I refuse to have a three-way conversation. If you talk to me, I expect eye contact. Meanwhile, you are typing some meaningless observation into the ether.” -- “People feel they’re not being shown enough consideration, that they’re being excluded if their partner is spending a lot of time using phones for socialising, playing games or working. It’s the fact that these devices are so mobile that makes the problem more widespread.” -- “Sometimes it’s an almost tragic scene. The couple are on holiday with their children and dad’s eyes are are glued to a bit of electronic gadgetry. He’s present but he’s absent at the same time. The very technology that is meant to bring people together is increasingly separating us from those we need to attend to most.”'

'Today's Mail: "I won't date him if he doesn't get unlimited texting."'

'I’m starting to think that Internet romances, including Mark Sanford’s, are not romances between people at all. They’re affairs with the Internet. Watch people who are newly in love, especially any kind of love that requires that the participants keep stealthy and apart, and they’re all over their iPhones and Palm Pres. It’s P.D.A. with P.D.A.’s. Romance seems to have become an online multiplayer fantasy-adventure game, no less thrilling than World of Warcraft, and open to all ages. Apparently you’re never too old to relish using special screen names to send cryptic messages on secret decoder devices.' -- 'The connection to communications technology — the connection to connection — has become part of what makes us human. In the idiom of those who are swooningly in love, it makes us “feel alive.” When we’re denied the connection to connection, it’s no wonder we lust for it.' -- Love, temes xXx

"I published my life on the fucking internet. And it doesn’t make people wanna be with me. It makes people not trust me. And I don’t know what the fuck to do about it." -- “It was like Justin was maintaining a celebrity gossip blog about himself. Who needs that kind of cruelty in their lives?” -- 'In 1994, Justin Hall invented oversharing ...no one knew that the self-revelation he found so addictive would one day become a temptation for millions. -- the transition we’re living through today.. The struggle to draw a line between the self and the world isn’t some novelty imposed on us by technology; it’s part of human development—an effort we all face from the moment our infant selves begin to notice there’s a world out there, beyond our bodies. The Web has just made the process of drawing this line more nettlesome. In the end we’re each going to find the compromise between sharing and discretion that’s right for ourselves. If we’re lucky, it will take less than the decade it took Hall.'

' ...sometimes I wonder how anyone ever gets to know anyone who is basically off the grid. It feels so forced and unnatural. You have to ask someone about their day and what was on their mind--manually! Ever think about introducing yourself on the subway? Ask them to unplug from their iPod to talk to a stranger in mid-sardine can transport with no ability to Ignore or Block? Yeah, right. How would they know who I was if they couldn't Google me? BTW, exactly what day was it that it became creepier *not* to have a web presence? -- "How did you meet?" Nowadays, it goes something like this, "Well, I found her after searching a keyword that I'm interested on Twitter..."

'The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship). -- ... positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak. -- "It's very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved."'

"I want you to feel proud of me for living an authentic life. I want you to understand WHY I am different than every1 else. I want you to understand that I won’t ‘achieve’ anything ’special’ in my lifetime, but I want you to ‘get’ why ‘that kind of stuff doesn’t matter to me’ and how my perspective on life ‘lessens pressure/expectations’ when it comes to ‘accomplishing’ stuff and letting things ‘be meaningful.’ I want u to ‘get’ my humor and snarkie perspective on the world. U r my best bro, but I think we can become even more bro-like in the future. I love you, MomBro."

'Qwitter e-mails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message like this: "John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet: What's the difference between Arial and Helvetica?"' -- :'(

'Users have tended to migrate from site to site as new services become more fashionable and old services become overpopulated with lame late adopters or worse, too many of those people who cause “contexts to collide”: As Boyd explains, “In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it’s often difficult to figure out what’s appropriate, let alone what can be understood.” When your current friends get to see how you interact with people who knew you decades ago, or when parents can scrutinize profile pages looking for insight into their children’s social life apart from them, it can be problematic.' -- (That 'contexts collide' observation is worth repeating)

Three dynamics 'that have been reconfigured as a result of social media. #1. Invisible Audiences. Social media introduces all sorts of invisible audiences. As a result, we are having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience. The potential invisible audiences can be stifling. #2. Collapsed Contexts. In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood. #3. Blurring of Public and Private. These distinctions are normally structured around audience and context with certain places or conversations being "public" or "private" [and] are much harder to manage when you have to contend with the shifts in how the environment is organized.'

"Optional paralysis, indifference and solipsism loom, as the coping strategies for the onslaught of realtime and realspace. When our social reality is ironed out into a stream of broadcasts on a feed, mediated by devices that guarantee each of us an isolation in an environment that gratifies our fantasies of total control, the illusion that friends can be monitored entirely on our own terms grows; the requirement of reciprocity begins to seem provisional, old-fashioned, a signal of a breakdown of the better technologies for person management. ...it seems to me a continuation of the space of consumerism—of impulsiveness, instrumentality, convenience for its own sake, and ersatz individualism. And obviously it is not just going to go away. We are all complicit in it, eventually. At some point it suits our purposes and we go along, as though we control the terms by which we interact with it. We don’t notice the creeping ways in which it begins to dictate terms to us."

"Solitude has been transformed into loneliness by the prevalence of tools that make it possible for us always to be connected. The tools assume an always-on status, so we do too, whether or not we need to. Because you can text your whereabouts at all times to your friends, you should do so. Because people can be contact you always, when they aren’t, it can begin to feel like a slight. Something about knowing people out there on line could be paying attention to what we are doing can bring out the borderline personality in all of us. The immediacy of the new medium for friendship sets friendship up on a customer service model, on which we are encouraged to expect immediate satisfaction on our own terms, since we are paying with that newly scarce currency, our attention. This commercial reciprocity threatens to preclude the possibility of the gratuitous reciprocity of friendship. The customer is always right, but the customer is always alone."